WOODRING: Hello, my name is Jim Woodring, and I'm calling from Seattle to talk Jack Davis.

MRS. DAVIS: Just a moment, please.

WOODRING: Thank you.

DAVIS: Hello?

WOODRING: Hello, Jack. It's Jim Woodring.

DAVIS: Hi Jim.

WOODRING: Hi. Are you ready to do that interview?

DAVIS: [Chuckles.] I'm right in the middle of trying to change a lock...

WOODRING: Oh, OK. Well...

DAVIS: ...on my door. Can you call me a little later? What time is it out there?

WOODRING: It's about 6 o'clock here.

DAVIS: Oh, lord.

WOODRING: No.

DAVIS: Well, you've been asleep, haven't you?

WOODRING: Well, only until recently.

DAVIS: Well, can you call me back in about an hour?

WOODRING: In about an hour. Sure.

DAVIS: Will that be all right?

WOODRING: Absolutely.

DAVIS: OK.

WOODRING: Thanks.

DAVIS: Bye, Jim.

WOODRING: Bye. Bye.

[Sound of phone dialing]

DAVIS: Hello?

WOODRING: Hello. Jack Davis?

DAVIS: Yeah?

WOODRING: Hi. Jim Woodring again.

DAVIS: Right, Jim. Listen, I'm sorry you had to get up so early.

WOODRING: No. No. That's OK.

DAVIS: Because I didn't even think about that!

WOODRING: That's OK.

DAVIS: You asked me what time'd be good, and I said, this would be good, but I hate you to get up that early.

WOODRING: No, I like to get up early. That's no problem. Did you get your lock fixed?

DAVIS: No I didn't. I'm no carpenter and I just quit. So I'm just going to leave it up to somebody else to come do it.

WOODRING: Is it one of those old skeleton key locks?

DAVIS: No, it's a doorknob that goes down into the basement, and the door won't shut. And the door is warped, and there's just no way I can change the little latches or anything, move them, because the screws are there. It's just not my forte, or whatever.

WOODRING: Huh. Well, good luck with that.

DAVIS: Yeah. So I'm just going to let it ride.

WOODRING: Okie-doke, then. Well, I guess we're ready to do this if you are.

DAVIS: Sure.

WOODRING: So Mad became a 25-cent comic book in 1954, and Kurtzman designed the new package for it, and picked out the paper for it and developed the layout and the general approach. And you worked on I guess the first four issues of those magazine issues or something like that. How did you feel about the new book compared to the old one?

DAVIS: Which book?

WOODRING: I'm sorry, the 25-cent black and white as opposed to the color comic. Were you happier to be working on something that was more adult? Did it seem...

DAVIS: You go from one thing to another. A comic book is a comic book, but when you start getting into the magazine bit, and we were using kind of a Craftint...

WOODRING: Right.

DAVIS: ...like the double Zipatone...

WOODRING: Yeah, that horrible smelling stuff.

DAVIS: We were experimenting with that. Wally Wood was good at that.

WOODRING: Yeah.

DAVIS: We worked on a special Craftint paper, and I think all of your editorial cartoonists sort of adopted that and they work with Craftint now.

WOODRING: Is that the stuff where the developer smelled like rotten eggs?

DAVIS: The what?

WOODRING: The developer for Craftint. Did that smell like rotten eggs?

DAVIS: I really don't know. We sure used a lot of it, but I don't know.

WOODRING: I remember getting some of that stuff when I was a teenager and being amazed at how the developer smelled.

Trimmed from The Comics Journal #225