William Joyce
Illustration from the book "Rocket Puppies," courtesy of William Joyce.
Four years ago, the Emmy and Academy-winning Shreveport author and illustrator William Joyce (best known for The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, The Guardians of Childhood series, and the Disney television show, Rolie Polie Olie) was feeling glum. It was the peak of the pandemic, human connection was at an all-time low, and he couldn’t shake the generalized gloominess of a world that felt at odds with itself.
A master of imagination, Joyce escaped into a world of whimsy of his own making—sillier and more absurd than any of the children’s books or programs he’s written before. Naming the result still makes him giggle, even after all this time: Rocket Puppies, Joyce’s 53rd children’s book, was released by Simon & Schuster on November 5 into a world that is still suffering from environmental anxiety, international wars, and political unrest.
The evocative title came to Joyce first; in fact it’s all he had when he pitched the concept to his editor. “What happens?” she asked him. “I don’t know, but they make people happy,” he responded. Her advice was to, perhaps, start with the villain.
William Joyce
Illustration from the book "Rocket Puppies," courtesy of William Joyce.
“I came up with this guy named Snarly McBummerpants, and I drew him, and he is the sourest looking dude you ever saw,” said Joyce. The character is a human spider-like figure with burning red eyes, “Mean Ray Vision,” and mopey smoke that puts everyone in the world in a bad mood.
So, the rocket puppies—wearing jetpacks (powered by the green energy provided by hugs)—are the only ones who can vanquish this global gloom. Joyce needed them to have a super power. “I thought about how, even if you don’t like dogs, you see puppies for sale, and even the biggest grump can’t resist,” he said. “And if that puppy looks up into your face, you know you’re done. There’s a percentage of people in that moment who will completely alter their lives and give into that dog looking at them.”
Thus, “Puppy Ray Vision.” “It is a formidable power,” said Joyce.
William Joyce
The cover of "Rocket Puppies" by William Joyce.
By the time the Rocket Puppies and their puppy ray vision are done with Snarly McBummerpants, his volcano of woe starts streaming glitter rainbows and “everything buoyant and beautiful and happy and shiny and color-filled and bright.” Bees stop stinging, miserly people share the last piece of pizza, bullies become florists, and even the concrete is happy. The utopia of the post-McBummerpants Earth created by Joyce is rendered using a colored pencil illustration style totally new to him. “I’ve used paint, watercolors, gouache, pen-and-ink, computers, but never colored pencils,” he said, describing the way he hoped to create the picket fence-better-than-real effect of Zerna Sharp’s early twentieth century Dick and Jane books. Though those illustrations were done in watercolor, the effect of the primitive 1930s and ‘40s printing press gave them a grainy effect that “felt a little removed and unreal”—and that Joyce hoped to imitate. “And I found doing it in colored pencil kind of recreated that spectacular otherworldly technicolor quality those books had.”
Writing and illustrating this project, which is the first children’s book Joyce has published in eight years, brought him an absurd sort of childish joy that he describes as subversive. In a world filled with uncertainty and fear, the imagination still allows for the creation of something as ridiculous as rocket puppies. And such silliness can still make people laugh. “The book is really meant to cheer up the parents who are reading this to their kids in a world that can sometimes be dark,” said Joyce, “just as much as it is about cheering up the kids.”
An animated film version of Rocket Puppies is coming to YouTube sometime in 2025, followed next fall by the release of the sequel Glitter Kittens. Find the book at simonandschuster.com.
