Zach Miller grew up three blocks from where Charles Schulz was raised in St. Paul, MN, a fact his parents pointed out while buying him Peanuts collections. Not surprisingly, Zach fell in love with comics and read everything he could get his hands on. Peanuts, Garfield, The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County and later Outland were, and remain, some of his favorites. In recent years Krazy Kat, Pogo, Dennis The Menace and Popeye have had a huge influence on his work, thanks to new collections published by Fantagraphics.


In grade school Zach would pull out The Prehistory of The Far Side during reading period, fending off his teacher’s criticism that it wasn’t a “real book” by explaining that he planned to read Gary Larson’s extensive commentary, not the comics. He would then spend the hour laughing at the comics.


While attending the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities, Zach tried his hand at comics, and after a few attempts created one about a delivery boy who was followed everywhere by a small monkey. He enjoyed the character dynamic and thought the two had great chemistry, but didn’t know what to do with them. Only when their nemesis, Kleptobot, was created did the strip begin to gel. Over the years Joe and Monkey has evolved stylistically, but the strip has remained true to its core concept: “Monkeys + Robots = Awesome.”


Zach began posting Joe and Monkey in the summer of 2004 on joeandmonkey.com. He graduated from UMN in 2005, and in January 2006 brought the feature to ComicsSherpa.com. In May of that year the first Joe and Monkey collection, Totally Boned, was awarded the inaugural Lulu Blooker Prize in Comics. In 2007 the sequel, The Definition of Awesome, which allegedly contains “the secret of happiness”, was nominated for the same award.