Interview: Steve Purcell

One thing I was sure of when starting the Comic Book Maker column was I wanted to get alot of opinions and thoughts from as many indy creators as possible. Sometimes when I talk to someone I can't really figure out on where to put the interview into the article. What is great about this blog is that I am able to then in turn at least share the interview with the three blog readers out there.

Today's interview is with Sam and Max creator Steve Purcell. Steve created Sam and Max many moons ago and saw his creation go from comic to video game to TV show. Steve now has a great career working over at Pixar, known for making a few little indy gems like The Incredibles and Finding Nemo. I talked with Steve briefly about his creations and how a cartoon dog and a rabbit became such big stars.



RYAN MCLELLAND: In doing Sam and Max, what was most important for you - meaning what did you want/need in the book? As Sam and Max skipped around to a few different publishers, what do you think helped them perceiver?

STEVE PURCELL: I had done Sam & Max comic strips in the school paper when I was in art college and before that my own cheesy Sam & Max comics when I was a kid in high school. They were always slapped together at the last minute. I first got the chance to do an actual published Sam & Max comic from Steve Moncuse. He was successfully self-publishing his own comic called Fish Police. He decided he wanted to publish a second title and asked if I would do a Sam & Max one shot. I knew how much work it would take to do a 42-page comic and for me I treated it as though I might never do another one. I wanted to make sure whoever was buying it was getting something that had a lot of attention put into it and would hopefully be something to keep. In writing it my goal was to make myself laugh at least once per page and pack it visually so you could come back to it later and hopefully discover something new. When I was working on the road trip book the black and white self-publishing boom had cooled off a bit so Steve put me in touch with Comico who published that one. Later, I did a couple of Sam & Max books with Marvel's creator-owned imprint, Epic comics. I think the reason that Sam & Max had a chance to be be published at different companies was because their cult following fortunately included Comics Editors.

RM: What do you contribute the success of Sam and Max to...as they went from comic book to video game to TV series?

SP: I've been lucky that Sam & Max have had fans in high places. When LucasArts licensed Sam & Max it was because the company President at the time, Kelly Flock knew the comics. He actually would read them to his daughter as bed time stories. Also like a sheep tick, Sam & Max had imbedded themselves into the culture of LucasArts at the time through their comic strips in the company newsletter and as subjects of test animations for the programmers. Later I had the chance to do the TV show because Dan Smith, a Story Editor at the Canadian animation studio, Nelvana had brought the book to their attention. Sam & Max became a factor in bringing me other kinds of concept and writing work as well.

RM: What advice would you give to any comic book creating hopefuls out there?

SP: Some comic creators grow up loving certain well-known characters and their dream is to work on a popular book. In that case use the characters you love in your sample pages or spec scripts. Editors hire based on your storytelling skills so if you want to pencil superhero comics, use a script for reference and show narrative. Don't just choreograph a fight scene for nine pages - show that you can stage conversations and transitions as well. If you're a writer create a spec script that shows that you can write convincing dialog and staging that's not overly bogged down in description. Keep it lean and flowing. For creator-owned characters like Sam & Max you need to work a bit differently. You have to be working on something you're crazy about because the rewards will not necessarily come right away. You do the book by your own rules and if no company is interested in publishing, it's not impossible to do it yourself. Even with a publisher, often a creator-owned book is like a partnership where you take the risk of spending your own time creating the book and they risk the money it takes to print and distribute it. Ifanything comes out of it you split it. It might take a while to generate a fanbase or maybe Cartoon Network or somebody will call and want to buy your idea to make mass entertainment. I made sure that any company that wanted to use Sam & Max had to return them when they were done.

Welcome To All (Part Deux)!

Welcome to all of those who read the first Comic Book Maker column over on Newsarama and made your way over here! This blog will be much more then just a supplement to the columns as I will attempt to cover more information, go further indepth, and show more artwork. Bios of the artists will be featured in the blog along with many of the full interviews I've done over recent weeks with many comic book professionals on the topic of indy comic book making! These interviews will be excerpted in the columns but will be placed in full here. Some of the interviews will not be included in the columns, so will be seen her for the first (and only) time.

To kick things off I am going to post tomorrow a new interview with Sam and Max creator Steve Purcell...so come back and enjoy! I thank you all for reading and hopefully something really great will be created by both these columns and the Wise Intelligence comic book.

Best,
Ryan

The Genesis of Wise Intelligence

The characters of Wise Intelligence are very dear to me. As WI was the first screenplay I ever wrote, I grew very attached to the four fictional fraternity brothers and their day in the life I wrote about back in 1997. I went on to do rewrite after rewrite, honing in on each character and trying to bring them more to life. While agencies looked and passed on the screenplay back in 98, I never again tried to send the screenplay out again. I just continued to write new screenplays while keeping Wise Intelligence always in the back of my mind.

I began writing Wise Intelligence back in 1997 after I got writer's block on another screenplay I was writing, this one a fictional account of my adventures in the Middle East the previous year. I wanted to write about some events I saw around me and do so in a comedic yet independent light. There were three underlying events that I wanted to bring forth in the screenplay.

One was people getting hitched so quickly. I had a fraternity brother who had this girlfriend and they would fight. Alot. All the time. At parties. In the student center. Walking around campus I'd see them off to the side fighting. Sure they had their great times too, isn't the best part of fighting the making up? One day they walked into the student center (where us fraternity boys hung out) and showed off the ring on her finger. Engaged. Weren't they just fighting and breaking up just yesterday? Today their engaged? What happens when they fight tomorrow, will he buy her a yacht?

1997 was the year that married teacher was sleeping with that 13 year-old. Having the kid's baby. Professed her undying love for the lad. A 13 year-old. Here was a woman who was married with kids and was boning her student. Shit like that never happened to me and THANK GOD. My teachers when I was 13 were fucking bone ugly. 165 years old. I could never imagine that, "Ryan come here baby. My dentures are soaking and I sooooo want to give you a gumjob."

The other was the date rape drug. That Spring Break was when it really made a big wave, when you'd see on the news all these girls were waking up on the beaches not remembering where they were and how they got there. All they knew was that they had been violated and left to rot on the beach. I never understood guys who had to rape a girl...I'd rather never have sex again then force someone to do something.

So I wanted to show these events in my screenplay for better or for worse. I wanted them to seem real and not really have a major impact on the four guys in my screenplay. It was more of a 'shit happens and here it is' sort of thing. In the end you sort of think that one character, JK, has learned his lesson when his ex gets drugged and raped. Of course by then it is too late, but you think you see a glimpse of hope in the lad. Then I wrote something after the credits that just continued to make him a bastard hopeless fuck of a man.

As those who buy the comic will read, the four guys in the comic (being Servo, Whorfin, JK, and Dean) all belong to a fraternity called 'Delta Rho Gamma' AKA 'The Dragons'. This actually stemmed from a stupid idea me and my friends had freshman year. While sitting around watching Bruce Lee movies one day (as we usually did every day), I thought that since us first semester freshman couldn't join fraternities until our second semester, we'd form our own. Nothing official or anything, it would just be an in-joke amongst me and my friends.

Because we watched Bruce Lee all the time, I took the name 'Dragon' for out fraternity (if you don't get the reference, you don't watch enough Bruce Lee). Snatched the DRG out of Dragon and that became the greek letters Delta Rho Gamma. We went to the guy who came to the student center and sold fraternity shirts and hats and got our own Delta Rho Gamma hats made. It was pretty retarded and those in real fraternities had no clue about us. They would come up and ask if we were new and we acted very hush-hush. Tell you and have to kill you sort of thing.

Soon enough word got around and soon we had people actually wanting to join our fraternity for real. Not knowing what to do to pledge these people, we took a cue from the flick 'Weird Science'. You see another favorite of ours was Eddie Murphy's 'Golden Child', so new pledges would wear underwear on their heads while watching the Golden Child. We'd leave the door open while this happened so whoever was roaming the hallways of the dorm would look in and laugh. 90 minutes later, you were in the fraternity. Welcome aboard. The whole thing died after most of us joined real fraternities, but we always had that common DRG bond. When it was time to write my ode to 'fratboy' life, of course they would be a part of the Delta Rho Gamma fraternity.

Of course the entire screenplay is nothing but cursing and arrogant fraternity boys, but it was fun to write. It's even more fun watching these characters come to life in a comic book, watching as the artists bring these characters to life. We'll see more of these characters here and in my Newsarama column in weeks to come.

Hoping my babble makes some sort of sense,
Ryan McLelland