Steven Ross Purcell
A graduate of the California College of Arts and Craft in Oakland, California in 1982, Purcell began his career creating comic strips for the college newsletter. He performed freelance work for Marvel Comics and Fishwrap Productions before publishing his first Sam & Max comic in 1987. He was hired by LucasArts as an artist and animator in 1988 and worked on several LucasArts adventure games, including the first two Monkey Island games, and Sam & Max Hit the Road.
Purcell collaborated with Nelvana to create a Sam & Max television series in 1997, and briefly worked as an animator for Industrial Light & Magic after leaving LucasArts. At Pixar, he co-wrote and co-directed the 2012 film Brave and developed a miniseries for the Cars franchise, Cars on the Road.
Career
Early career
Purcell began creating comic books while an undergraduate at the California College of the Arts in 1980; he produced comic strips for the weekly newsletter. The strips featured Sam and Max, an anthropomorphic dog and rabbit duo who work as vigilantes and private investigators. Purcell drew the first strip the night before the deadline. After graduating in 1982,
he became involved in freelance illustration working briefly for
Marvel Comics,
Chaosium, and on Steven Moncuse's
Fish Police series. Moncuse approached Purcell about the possibility of another comic book series to accompany his well-performing
Fish Police series in 1987.
Purcell agreed, and wrote his first feature-length comic using the characters of Sam and Max. The 32-page comic was published by Fishwrap Productions in 1987.
The comic contained two
Sam & Max stories: "Monkeys Violating the Heavenly Temple", a name which Purcell found on a
firework and thought was appropriate; and "Night of the Gilded Heron-Shark". Purcell published another story in a 1987 issue of
Critters titled "Night of the Cringing Wildebeest". The three stories established the basics for Purcell's future work with the characters.
LucasArts
Purcell was hired by
LucasArts, then known as Lucasfilm Games, as an animator in 1988 but was
Layoff when the project he was working on was canceled.
He was rehired to produce art for
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, a graphic adventure game .
Later he was commissioned to create the cover artwork for
Maniac Mansion and the first two
Monkey Island games and researched
for the adventure game version of
. He worked with animation in several LucasArts adventure games, published three more
Sam & Max comic books during that time, and created short comic strips for LucasArts' quarterly newsletter,
The Adventurer.
The characters eventually became training materials for LucasArts programmers working with
SCUMM, the core
game engine used by LucasArts adventure games.
Purcell created versions of Sam and Max in their office for new programmers to work on under Ron Gilbert, practicing their craft.
; Purcell has been surprised at the cult status the characters acquired
|alt=A anthropomorphic dog in a suit and fedora drives a police DeSoto through a cityscape, while an anthropomorphic rabbit climbs out the window. An array of dead insects and a rat have been collected on the car's grille. The title "Sam & Max" is displayed prominently, with "Freelance Police Special" below.]]
After a positive reception to the Sam & Max strips in The Adventurer and wanting to expand into other franchises following Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island, LucasArts offered to create a graphic adventure game based on the characters in 1992.
Later work
Purcell joined with story editor Dan Smith from Canadian studio
Nelvana to create an animated television series of
Sam & Max in 1996. The result was the 1997 series
, broadcast on
Fox Kids in the United States, YTV in Canada and Channel 4 in the
United Kingdom. Purcell wrote the jokes for each installment of the 24-episode series, and wrote the scripts for four episodes. Although violence and profanity common in the
Sam & Max franchise had been toned down due to the target audience of children, Purcell was content that the characters maintained their moral ambiguity. Some groups of parents in the United States attempted to have the series pulled from networks due to content issues; Purcell was pleased that they "had managed to ruffle some feathers along the way".
Two
Sam & Max comic strips appeared in Fox's
Totally Fox Kids Magazine in 1998 to accompany the series; other
Sam & Max strips appeared in
Wizard and
Oni Press. During the development of the television series in 1997, Purcell co-authored and illustrated the
Hellboy Christmas Special with
Mike Mignola and
Gary Gianni.
After the conclusion of the
Sam & Max animated series, Purcell was briefly employed by Industrial Light & Magic to work on digital effects for a film version of
Frankenstein. Despite his work, the project was canceled; Purcell believes that some of the development work morphed into ILM's contributions to
Van Helsing.
While at ILM, he was involved in a project to create an animated film based on
Monkey Island;
while the project did not reach fruition, Purcell began posting concept art he had produced for the film on his personal blog several years later.
Pixar and Telltale Games
After a brief stint at ILM, Purcell moved to
Pixar.
Although he worked at Pixar, Purcell acted as an advisor in the development of
, a sequel to
Sam & Max Hit the Road which began development in 2002 under LucasArts. Purcell provided
Michael Stemmle's development team with concept art and assisted in the creation of the game's plot.
Despite its smoothly proceeding development, LucasArts abruptly canceled the project in March 2004. Purcell was unable to understand why development halted; he described himself as "frustrated and disappointed" at the decision.
In 2005, LucasArts' license with Purcell which gave them the right to produce games based on the Sam & Max franchise expired. That allowed Purcell to take the franchise to Telltale Games in San Rafael, California, a new company formed by members of Stemmle's development team. A new episodic series of Sam & Max games, Sam & Max Save the World, was announced.
At Pixar's story development department, Purcell contributed screenplay material and voice work for the 2006 film Cars, and designed the character of the Screamin' Banshee in the short Mater and the Ghostlight.
In 2014, Purcell wrote and directed the Pixar Christmas special Toy Story That Time Forgot which aired on ABC on December 2, 2014.
Personal life
Purcell grew up in California and lives there. He has a younger brother, David. In a 2000 interview, Purcell said that he had been drawing all his life, and that he still has drawings he made when he was three years old.
Noting that his line of creative work depends entirely on things one learns, Purcell describes himself as an "average" student at school, but wishing that he had tried harder at some classes.
After studying film-making courses at junior college, Purcell enrolled in the California College of the Arts to read fine art; he received a bachelor's degree in fine arts there. He befriended
Mike Mignola and later
Art Adams while at the college.
Citing the
Marx Brothers,
Peter Sellers, and
Monty Python as among his interests, he says that he is inspired by "creative people who have made their seemingly most self-indulgent artistic whims into a career".
During the development of
Sam & Max Hit the Road in 1993, Purcell married fellow lead designer Collette Michaud.
They have two sons.
The characters of Sam and Max were created in Purcell's youth; his brother Dave originally came up with several comics around the idea of a dog and rabbit detective duo. Dave would often leave unfinished comics around the house. Deliberately making the characters mix up each other's names, shoot at each other and mock the way in which they had been drawn, Steve, in a case of sibling rivalry, would sometimes finish the stories in parodies of their original form. That developed from Steve mocking his brother to the creation of his own stories with the characters.
In the late 1970s, Dave Purcell gave Steve the rights to the characters; he signed them over in a contract on Steve's birthday and allowed him to develop the characters in his own way.
Credited works
Films
|
|
| 2006 | Cars | | | | | Tractors | Additional Screenplay Material |
| 2007 | Ratatouille | | | | | | Pixar Productions |
| 2012 | Brave | | | | | The Crow | Song Lyricist: "Song of Mor'du" |
| 2017 | Coco | | | | | | Pixar Senior Creative Team |
| 2018 | Incredibles 2 | | | | | |
| 2019 | Toy Story 4 | | | | | The Dummies |
| 2022 | Turning Red | | | | | |
| Lightyear | | | | | |
| 2023 | Elemental | | | | | |
| 2024 | Inside Out 2 | | | | | Deep Dark Secret | |
| 2026 | Hoppers | | | | | Amphibian King | |
Shorts
|
|
| 2006 | Mater and the Ghostlight | | | | | Screamin' Banshee | Additional Character Designer |
| 2009 | George and A.J. | | | | | Carl | |
| 2009-10 | | | | | | Additional Voices | Episodes 5-9 |
| 2012 | The Legend of Mor'du | | | | | The Crow | |
| 2013-14 | | | | | | Additional Voices/Sandy Dunes | Episodes 3-4 |
| 2015 | Borrowed Time | | | | | Additional Voices | |
| 2022 | Cars on the Road | | | | | Randy/Wraith Rod | Disney+ Original short films; directed Episodes 1, 2, and 8; Pixar Senior Creative Team |
Television
|
|
| 1988 | The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley | | | | | Production crew |
| 1997–98 | | | | | | Writing and design |
| 2014 | Toy Story That Time Forgot | | | | The Cleric | TV special |
| 2025 | Win or Lose | | | | | Pixar Senior Creative Team (Episode 8: "Home") |
Bibliography
-
Amazing High Adventure (1984) – cover artwork
-
Different Worlds (1984) – cover artwork
-
New Mutants (1986) – penciller
-
Fish Police (1987) – pencils
-
Fish Police #7 (1987) – pencils, Inker and Letterer
-
Fish Police #9 (1987) – pencils and inks
-
Alpha Flight #47 (1987) – pencils
-
(1987)
-
Critters #19: Sam & Max in "Night of the Cringing Wildebeest" (1987)
-
Tournament of Dreams (1987) – cover artwork
-
RuneQuest (1987–88) – cover artwork
-
Gumby (1988) – writing
-
GrimJack: Sam & Max in "Fair Wind to Java" (1988)
-
Sam & Max: Freelance Police special (1989)
-
Critters #50: Sam & Max in "The Damned Don't Dance" (1990)
-
Marvel Comics Presents #41: "Wolverine" (1990) – pencils and inks
-
Sam & Max: Freelance Police: "Bad Day on the Moon" (1992)
-
Sam & Max: Freelance Police special color edition (1992)
-
Fast Forward #3 (1992) – pencils, inks and Colorist
-
Defenders of Dynatron City (1992)
-
The Collected Sam & Max: Surfin' The Highway (1995)
-
Dark Horse Presents #107: "Rusty Razorclam, President of Neptune" (1996) – writing
-
Hellboy Christmas Special (1997) – writing, pencils, ink and color
-
Wizard: Sam & Max in "Belly of the Beast" (1997)
-
Oni Press: Sam & Max in "Skeptical Investigators" (1998)
-
Fox Kids: Sam & Max in "Something's Not Right Here" (1998)
-
Totally Fox Kids Magazine #31: Sam & Max in "Action Figure Surgery" (1998)
-
Batman Villains Secret Files and Origins #1: "If A Man Be Clay!" (2005)
-
Sam & Max: The Big Sleep (2005–2007)
-
The Age of S&M (2006)
-
The Effigy Mound (2007)
-
Sam & Max: Surfin' The Highway anniversary edition (2008)
-
Brave: One Perfect Day (2012)
Video games
|
| Lucasfilm Games |
| Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders |
| Game tester |
| The Assembly Line |
| Lucasfilm Games |
| Animation, graphics and artwork |
| Graphics and artwork |
| LucasArts |
| Johnson Voorsanger Productions |
| LucasArts |
| Johnson Voorsanger Productions |
| LucasArts |
| Toys For Bob |
| LucasArts |
LucasArts
Big Ape Productions |
| LucasArts |
| Various |
| AWE Games |
| Various |
| Telltale Games |
| Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space |
| Artwork |
|
| HappyGiant |
External links
