Steve Purcell is the legal owner of the Sam & Max copyrights and the sole writer/illustrator for the Sam & Max comics. He is also the voice of Duncan B. Dills in Sam & Max: This Time It's Virtual[1].
Career[]
Early Life[]
As a child, Steve used to make Superhero Parody comics he'd drawn in his house on random notebooks he had lying around, and was overall having fun and trying to practice the skills of art. Meanwhile, his younger brother, Dave Purcell, was making his own little comics, focused around Detectives. One of these was a comic called "Zot! Starring Sam & Max", a comic about two detectives, a dog named Sam and a rabbit named Max. Steve just so happened to come across some of the comics he left lying around, which were unfinished, one of them being Zot! As an Older Brother who was usually teasing his younger sibling, he thought that the comic he made was sarcastically and ironically hilarious from the poor quality, and so, decided to finish up his comics, in a style that mocks his brother's work. He would make Sam & Max talk mean, talk with really obscure and long words, talk with silly phrases and constant catchphrases, and also draw them incorrectly on purpose. Dave was really annoyed and irritated that his creations were being mocked by his brother, but didn't do anything about it for years.
Years later, on one of Steve's Birthdays, Dave gave him a present: A Document. This document informed Steve that he no longer has interest in the creations he has made, and would like to move on from seeing them constantly get mocked by Steve, and so, he decided to give his big brother the rights to Sam & Max's characters. And so, history was changed.
Early career[]
At the California College of Arts and Crafts where Purcell attended and graduated, Sam & Max appeared in print for the first time in 1980. In between illustration assignments and animation work for LucasArts and Marvel Comics, in 1987, the first full-fledged Sam & Max 32-page comic appeared. Three other Sam & Max books were later produced.
LucasArts work[]
Steve contributed to the background work and animation for several LucasArts adventure games in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The most popular of the games he worked on were the first two Monkey Island games. Steve also provided the box artwork for these two games, as well as the covers to Zak McKracken and Pipe Dream. He illustrated the Grail diary of Henry Jones, which accompanied the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure game. Purcell also painted several Sam & Max comic strips for the LucasArts company newsletter, The Adventurer.
During this period, many of the games made at LucasArts featured cameos or glimpses of Sam and Max. For instance, both characters show up in the 1990 released The Secret of Monkey Island as idols to the Monkey Island cannibals, located in front of the giant monkey head.[2] Day of the Tentacle features Max depicted on a black and white portrait, dressed up in a suit, wearing a bow tie on the second floor of the Edison mansion.[3]
In 1993 Purcell created an adventure game based on the characters and comic book, called Sam & Max Hit the Road. It was developed by LucasArts, and saw Sam and Max traveling America in search of two missing carnival freakshow attractions—Bruno the Bigfoot and Trixie the Giraffe-necked Girl. Purcell co-designed the game with Sean Clark, Michael Stemmle and Collette Michaud.
After leaving LucasArts, Purcell worked for a time at Industrial Light and Magic working on an eventually-canceled Frankenstein animated film.
Post LucasArts[]
In 1997, Sam and Max had their own Fox Kids-produced animated TV series, which ran for one season. Some changes were made to the world of the comics and the game, principally the addition of a pre-teen girl genius character "The Geek", but much of the humor remained intact. The cartoon focused less on guns and violence, and more on weirdness.
Purcell later joined Pixar Animation Studios to work in their Story Development division, where he works to this day. He is amongst other things credited under additional screenplay material for the animated movie Cars.
LucasArts's sequel to Sam & Max Hit the Road, Sam & Max: Freelance Police, was suddenly canceled very late in its production in March 2004. Sometime following this cancellation, the game rights reverted back to Purcell's ownership. In September 2005, it was announced that Telltale Games, a small company started by ex-LucasArts employees who had been working on Freelance Police, was working on creating a new episodic Sam & Max game series with the help of Purcell. The first game of the series Sam & Max Save the World, Culture Shock, was released on October 17 2006. The second game, Situation: Comedy, was released on December 21 2006.
Around the time Culture Shock was announced, Steve started work on The Big Sleep, a webcomic hosted by Telltale which ran from 2005 through 2007. He currently maintains a blog called Spudvision, on which he posts various art, using the alias Starchie Spudnoggen.
In 2023, Purcell was among 75 Pixar employees laid off by The Walt Disney Company as part of an ongoing company-wide restructuring[4].
Trivia[]
- Purcell is not considering the possibility of Pixar adapting Sam & Max into a film, as the characters' moral ambiguity is inconsistent with traditional Pixar stories[5].
See Also[]
External Links[]
- Spudvision, Steve Purcell's blog.
- facebook.com/steve.purcell.77, Steve Purcell's facebook.
References[]
- ↑ https://uploadvr.com/sam-max-vr-steve-purvell/
- ↑ http://dotplan.codesurgeonblog.com/post/26516100
- ↑ http://dotplan.codesurgeonblog.com/post/27683914
- ↑ https://www.thewrap.com/pixar-existential-crisis-elemental-lightyear/
- ↑ Day, Ashley (2009). "Tales from Monkey Island". Retro Gamer. No. 70. Imagine Publishing. p. 32.
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