Yes, I know that Devin “the Devil” Barista looks like Kris Straub.

I’m frankly kind of amazed how many people emailed me to sincerely ask if I had done this subconsciously. What would that say about my opinion of Kris? That he has devilish features? That he’s evil? No. While both of those things are true, there is a very specific reason that I modeled Devin after Kris.

So let’s rewind to right after PvP The Series finished up. We knew that there wasn’t going to be a second season and Blind Ferret was already winding down their animation division. I wanted to see if maybe I could do a couple PvP shorts in flash, using very limited animation. Kind of like a PvP version of the Blamimations. But I wanted something that might work even if you were unfamiliar with PvP, so I came up with the idea of a spin-off called Brent And The Devil.

The plot centered around Brent, a coffee addict who sold his soul to the devil for the perfect cup of coffee. He had no idea what he was doing and now he was stuck in this horrible bargain. But the Devil only made him do really stupid menial tasks and every time Brent was convinced the whole thing was a scam, the devil would do something to scare him into believing it.

So I wrote a 30 second script, got Kris to do the voice of the Devil and Bob Bray to reprise his voice acting as Brent. And I tried my hand at animating it in flash. Here’s as far as I got.

And then I forgot about it. And some time later a fan who happens to be an animated named Kevin started corresponding with me about his off time. And how he would like to work on something PvP related. So I showed him BaTD and he thought he would take a crack at it. This is as far as Kevin got.

Brent And The Devil from Monkey and Tiger on Vimeo.

And then Kevin got busy and I got busy and nothing ever came of it. But I thought hell, it was a good idea. Why not make it canonical? Right? Sure.

And there you have it. The story of how Kris Straub became the devil.