William "Bill" Joyce, Moonbot Studios, on his friend, the late Maurice Sendak, in Newsweek's The Daily Beast

Bill Joyce, Shreveport, a photo by trudeau on Flickr.

"My last visit with Maurice Sendak was the best," says Bill Joyce in The Daily Beast, a publication of Newsweek online.

"Maurice had been essential in my life since 1963. Where the Wild Things Are had cushioned the primal blow of losing Santa Claus and King Kong in the same crummy week when I was 5. When I was 16, I’d saved every nickel I could rub together to buy The Juniper Tree, his collection of Grimm’s stories. My mother had just died and I was lost in grief. But I found the perfect place to heal in Maurice’s beautiful, harrowing illustrations."

Follow Joyce's Sendak memories here.