Steve Purcell

What would S&M be without him?

Steve Purcell is the legal owner of the Sam & Max copyrights and the sole writer/illustrator for the Sam & Max comics.

Career

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 1987, the first full-fledged Sam & Max 32-page comic appeared. In between illustration assignments and animation work for LucasArts, three other Sam & Max books were produced. During this time he also did freelance work for Marvel Comics, as well as writing the comic book series, Defenders of Dynatron City.

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. 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.

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 & 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. He is currently co-directing the upcoming movie Brave, after doing writing, concept art and story supervising for it.

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 Culture Shock was released on October 17 2006 by GameTap, the second game, Sam & Max Situation: Comedy was released on December 21 2006 by GameTap. After finishing the 6th episode in April 2007, Season One was finished. Due to the success of Season One, Season Two was started on GameTap and the Telltale Website in December 2007.

Around the time Season One 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.

Freelance and miscellaneous work

Steve Purcell has been involved in the following non-Sam & Max comics and miscellaneous covers.

	Year	Publisher	involvement
Amazing High Adventure	1984	Marvel	Pencils.
Different Worlds #37	1984	Chaosium	Cover.
Animax	1986	Marvel	Pencils and covers.
New Mutants #43	1986	Marvel	Pencils.
Alpha Flight #47	1987	Marvel	Pencils.
RuneQuest	1987 -1988	Avalon Hill	Four covers.
Mr Monster	1987	Dark Horse Comics	Several covers.
Gumby's Winter Fun Special	1988	Comico	Writing.
Marvel Comics Presents #41	1990	Marvel	Cover.
Marvel Comics Presents #42	1990	Marvel	Back cover.
Hero: Warrior of the Mystic Realms	1990	Marvel	Covers of issues 1-6, pencils of issues 1-4.
Defenders of Dynatron City	1992	Marvel	Story and covers.
Wolverine #55	1992	Marvel	Some penciling.
Fast Forward #3: StoryTellers	1993	Piranha Press	Cover, Toybox story.
Saturday Morning Cartoon	1996	Marvel	Some penciling.
Dark Horse Presents #107	1996	Dark Horse Comics	Writing: Rusty Razorclam, President of Neptune
Hellboy Christmas Special	1997	Dark Horse Comics	Toybox comic.
Nocturnals: Troll Bridge	2000	Oni press	Back cover.
Paper Museum	2002	Jungle Boy Press	Part of the cover.
Batman Villians secret files	2005	DC	Writing: If a Man Be Clay!

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  RuneQuest: Snake Pipe Hollow

• 

  Defenders of Dynatron City #6

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  Rusty Razorclam

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  Nocturnals

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  Paper Museum

See Also

Sam & Max (franchise)

LucasArts

The Adventurer comics

Sam & Max sightings in LucasArts games

Telltale Games

The Big Sleep

External links

Spudvision, Steve Purcell's blog.

Interviews

• Gamasutra
• Joystiq
• Toon Zone
• World of Monkey Island
• Alternative Magazine Online
• Sam & Max.co.uk
• Adventure Classic Gaming
• Strange Kids Club

This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Steve Purcell. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Sam & Max Wiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.