Whenever I do a Q&A session someone always asks that dreaded question: "Where do you get your ideas from?"

I have no idea how to answer that question. No one who writes or draws or pursues any even semi-artistic endeavor can ... ideas just come. Sometimes you can document just when they come ... and if you're lucky, what you were thinking about just before they came ... but no one knows where they come from.

Dr. Symm, like so many things I've written and drawn over the years, just suddenly appeared on my scratch pad one day. It was while I was writing The Bestiary, and I was doodling beholders, umber hulks, and other D&D monsters when suddenly I found myself drawing a monkey in a lab coat. Before I knew it the entire page was filled with sketches of someone I wanted to call "professor primate." Not only that, each drawing seemed to be depicting a different bizarre adventurer starring this simian scientist. I jotted down some notes about them ... "monkey vs. steam-powered robot monkey" ... "time travel bathysphere" ... "totem pole comes to life and wants to eat at McDonalds" ... strange stuff like that. And by the time I finished, the ape in the lab coat had a name too: Dr. Ian Symm—the World's Smartest Monkey.

At first I thought I'd serialize Dr. Symm's adventures in a daily-style comic strip. I was reading the collection of Daniel Pinkwater & Tony Auth's wonderful (if short lived) comic strip Norb and thought it would be great to do something in that vein. I even sketched out the first dozen or so strips. But ultimately I had to focus my efforts on finishing The Bestiary and I soon forgot about Dr. Symm.

Then a few years later I was at Tenn Con (a wonderful game convention held in Knoxville, TN every October ... you should check it out if you live anywhere nearby) when a few friends guys I used to work with at TSR were talking about putting together a new independent gaming magazine. It sounded not only like a lot of fun, but also like a REALLY good idea. Now, I was working for Wizards of the Coast by that point, so I had some heavy restrictions about write for an independent magazine ... but there was nothing stopping me from doing cartoons for them! And the first thing that popped into my head was Dr. Symm.

Of course, when I described the strip to them ("It's about the world's smartest monkey and his beautiful human assistant ... they have all kinds of weird science adventures ... each issue could have a 4-page story ... it'll be great"), my friends weren't so sure. They wanted me to do something that was more like Phil Foglio's What's New comic. But I had my heart set on the monkey. In the end we reached a compromise ... I'd do 2 pages of Dr. Symm and I'd ALSO do 2 pages of a game-industry-skewering comic called "Table Talk." Eventually it was cut back to 1 page per comic (mainly because I also had to do the covers for each issue), but Dr. Symm made the cut!

The magazine, enigmatically called Shred, came out in March of 2000 ... but sadly it never really garnered an audience. We liked it fine ... and so did all our friends ... but the distributors never really got it. Still for most of that year I produced a page a month about the world's smartest monkey ... and in spite of their misgivings, my partners grew to love him as much as I did. The seventh issue of Shred featured an installment of Dr. Symm that ended with him disappearing without a trace ... sadly, the magazine itself suffered the same fate. Neither has been heard from since.

I still doodle him occasionally ... he shows up on my scratch pad having all kinds of wild adventures. Perhaps some day I'll be able to tell these stories. But for now, I present the complete, unexpurgated, weird science adventures of Dr. Symm, the world's smartest monkey.