Sam & Max is an American media franchise about Sam and Max, a pair of anthropomorphic vigilante private investigators. The characters, who occupy a universe that parodies American popular culture, were created by Dave Purcell before being developed by his brother Steve Purcell in their youths, and later debuted in a 1987 comic book series. The characters have since been the subject of a graphic adventure video game developed by LucasArts, a television series produced for Fox in cooperation with Nelvana Limited, and a series of episodic adventure games developed by Telltale Games. In addition, a variety of machinima and a webcomic have been produced for the series.
The characters are based in a dilapidated office block in New York City. Sam is a six-foot-tall dog who wears a suit and a fedora, while Max is a short and aggressive "hyperkinetic rabbity thing". As the Freelance Police, both enjoy solving problems and cases as maniacally as possible, often with complete disregard for the law. Driving a seemingly indestructible black-and-white 1960 DeSoto Adventurer, the pair travel to many contemporary and historical locations to fight crime, including the Moon, Ancient Egypt, the White House and the Philippines, as well as several fictitious locations.
The series has been very successful despite its relatively limited amount of media, and has gathered a significant fan base. However, the franchise did not gain more widespread recognition until after the 1993 release of LucasArts' Sam & Max Hit the Road, which cultivated interest in Purcell's original comics. Sam & Max Hit the Road is regarded as an exceptional adventure game and an iconic classic of computer gaming in the 1990s. Subsequent video games and the television series have also fared well with both critics and fans; critics consider the episodic video games to be the first successful application of the episodic distribution model.
Overview Creation The idea of Sam & Max originated with Steve Purcell's younger brother, Dave, who invented the concept of a comic about a detective team consisting of a dog and a rabbit in his youth. Dave often left the comics around the house, so Steve, in a case of sibling rivalry, often finished the incomplete stories in parodies of their original form, deliberately making the characters mix up each other's names, over-explain things, shoot at each other and mock the way in which they had been drawn, as "kind of a parody of the way a kid talks when he's writing comics". Over time, this developed from Steve merely mocking his brother's work to him creating his own full stories with the characters. Ultimately, in the late 1970s, Dave Purcell gave Steve the rights to the characters, signing them over in a contract on Steve's birthday and allowing him to develop the characters in his own way. In 1980, Purcell began to produce Sam & Max comic strips for the weekly newsletter of the California College of Arts and Crafts. While the visual appearance of the characters had not yet been fully developed, the stories were similar in style to those that followed when Purcell was offered by Fish Police author Steven Moncuse the chance to publish his work properly in 1987.
Many aspects of the Sam & Max comics were influenced by Purcell's own experiences. Rats and cockroaches are common throughout the franchise, the former inspired by Purcell's pet rat. In another example, Sam and Max are occasionally shown playing a game called "fizzball", in which the object of the exercise is to hit a can of beer in mid-air with a solid axe handle. Purcell had previously invented the game with his friends, including fellow comic book writers Art Adams and Mike Mignola.
Characters
Sam Sam is a laid-back but enthusiastic, brown-coated anthropomorphic Irish Wolfhound, described as a "canine shamus". He wears either a gray or blue suit with a matching fedora, to make people more cooperative when conversing with a six-foot talking dog. A warped sense of justice makes Sam the more passionate of the pair for their police work, only held back from taking his job seriously by Max. Nevertheless, he enjoys the mannerisms and dress that come with their line of work. Sam possesses near encyclopedic amounts of knowledge, particularly on obscure topics, and is prone to long-winded sentences filled with elaborate terminology. Although he is always keen to display this information—regardless of its accuracy—Sam can be capable of total ignorance towards more practical matters; for instance, despite his regard for his DeSoto Adventurer, he is severely negligent with the car's maintenance. Sam still retains various doglike qualities: he is excitable and enthusiastic, but also susceptible to emotions of embarrassment and guilt. Nevertheless, Sam is "not above sticking his head out the car window and letting his tongue flap in the breeze". Sam is very friendly and polite in spite of his over-the-top recklessness as an officer, and is shown to be quite cordial with his allies. That said, while he does deeply care about his friends, he has no problems with using manipulative tactics on them in order to further his goals when it comes to his job. He rarely loses his temper, and is able to react to panic-inducing situations with extreme calm. At the off chance he does get angry, Sam tends to react in a violent, uncharacteristically savage manner, in which case Max usually calms him down and prevents him from acting upon his anger. Sam usually is armed with an oversized .44 revolver.
Sam is voiced by Bill Farmer in Sam & Max Hit the Road, Harvey Atkin in the animated series and David Nowlin from Telltale's games onward.
Max Max is an anthropomorphic "hyperkinetic, three-foot rabbity thing" with white fur, but prefers being called a lagomorph. Max retains few characteristics consistent with a rabbit, with permanently rigid ears set in an excited posture and a huge jaw normally stuck in a crazed grin. Unhinged, uninhibited and near psychotic, Max enjoys violence and tends to prefer the aggressive way of solving problems, seeing the world as little more than a vessel for his "pinball-like stream of consciousness". This creates a seeming disregard for self-preservation; Max will revel in dangerous situations with little impression that he understands the risks he faces. As a result, Max is usually enthusiastic to engage in any activity, including being used by Sam as a cable cutter or an impromptu bludgeon. Despite this, Max possesses a sharp mind and an observational nature, and enjoys interpreting new experiences in as unpredictable a manner as possible. However, Max has a distaste for long stories and occasionally loses focus during lengthy scenes of plot exposition; by his own admission, Max possesses a particularly short attention span. On top of this short attention span, it has been shown numerous times that Max has an extremely poor memory to go along with it. Despite his seemingly heartless personality, he does have moments where he demonstrates care and compassion for others, and he believes strongly in upholding the law in his own twisted way. He's also very protective of Sam, but Max can still act violently towards his friend, stating that when he dies, he will take Sam with him. Moreover, Max is extremely possessive of Sam and their status as partners and best friends. Max traditionally carries a Luger pistol, but as he wears no clothes, other characters often make comments as to where Max keeps it on his person. Purcell considers Max to be representative of pure id, the uncoordinated instinctual trends of the human psyche.
Max's voice is provided by Nick Jameson in Sam & Max Hit the Road and by Robert Tinkler in the animated series. Andrew Chaikin originally voiced Max in the first episode of Telltale's games before being replaced by William Kasten, while Dave Boat voices the character from Poker Night 2 onward.
Media Comic books
Sam and Max debuted in the 1987 comic book series Sam & Max: Freelance Police, published by Fishwrap Productions, also the publisher of Fish Police. The first comic, "Monkeys Violating the Heavenly Temple", was Steve Purcell's first full story. The comic came about after Purcell agreed to create a full Sam & Max story for publication alongside Steve Moncuse's Fish Police series. "Monkeys Violating the Heavenly Temple" established many of the key features in the series; the main story of the comic saw the Freelance Police journey to the Philippines to stop a volcano god cult. "Night of the Gilded Heron-Shark" and "Night of the Cringing Wildebeest" accompanied the main story, focusing on a stand-off with a group of gangsters in Sam and Max's office and an investigation into a carnival refreshment booth respectively.
Over the subsequent years, several other comics were published, often by different publishers, including Comico Comics and Epic Comics. "Fair Wind to Java" was originally published in 1988 as a Munden's Bar story in the pages of First Comics' Grimjack, featuring the Freelance Police fighting pyramid-building aliens in Ancient Egypt, and was followed in 1989 by "On the Road", a three chapter story showing what Sam and Max do on vacation. In 1990, Christmas-themed story "The Damned Don't Dance" was released. 1992 saw the release of two further comics: "Bad Day On The Moon" took the Freelance Police to deal with a roach infestation bothering giant rats on the Moon, and was later adapted as a story for the animated TV series, whilst "Beast From The Cereal Aisle" focused on the duo conducting an exorcism at the local supermarket. Two more comics were produced in 1997, "The Kids Take Over" and "Belly Of The Beast". The former has Sam and Max wake up from cryogenic sleep to discover that the entire world is now ruled by children while the latter sees the Freelance Police confronting a vampire abducting children at Halloween.
Purcell joined LucasArts in 1988 as an artist and game designer, where he was approached about contributing to LucasArts' new quarterly newsletter, The Adventurer, a publication designed to inform customers about upcoming LucasArts games and company news. From its debut issue in 1990 to 1996, Purcell created twelve comic strips for the newsletter. The strips portrayed a variety of stories, from similar plots as in the comic books to parodies of LucasArts games such as Monkey Island and Full Throttle and the Lucasfilm franchises Star Wars and Indiana Jones.
In 1995, all of the comics and The Adventurer strips published to that date were released in a compilation, Sam & Max: Surfin' the Highway. Published by Marlowe & Company, the 154 page book was updated and republished in 1996. This original version of Surfin' the Highway went out of print in 1997, becoming a high-priced collector's item sold through services such as eBay. In 2007, a 197-page twenty-year anniversary edition, containing all printed comics and strips as well as a variety of other artwork, was co-designed by Steve Purcell and Jake Rodkin and published by Telltale Games. This second publication received an Eisner Award nomination for "Best Graphic Album – Reprint" in 2009.
In December 2005, Purcell started a Sam & Max webcomic, hosted on the website of Telltale Games. Entitled "The Big Sleep", the webcomic began with Sam and Max bursting out of their graves at Kilpeck Church in England, symbolizing the Freelance Police's return after nearly a decade. In the twelve page story, Max has to save Sam after earwigs start a colony in Sam's brain. The webcomic concluded in April 2007, and was later awarded the Eisner Award for "Best Digital Comic" of 2007.
Video games