Steve Purcell is best known as the creator of comic book characters Sam and Max, of the Freelance Police - a dog and rabbit crime-fighting duo.

At the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1980, Sam & Max appeared in print for the first time and 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.

Steve contributed a lot of the background work and animation for LucasArts Adventure Games in the 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. During this period, many of the games made at LucasArts featured cameos or glimpses of Steve's characters Sam and Max. Some time in the early 1990s Purcell created an adventure game, called Sam and 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.

In the late 90s, Steve's Sam and Max had its own Fox Kids 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.

LucasArts's sequel to Sam and Max Hit the Road, Sam and Max: Freelance Police, was suddenly canceled very late in its production in March 2004.

See also

• Comics

External links

• http://www.samandmax.net/ (Unofficial Sam and Max Website)