You Don’t Know Jack?

“One of my goals in life was to go to one place and stay put,” says Jack Unruh, and for more than forty years the Kansas native has made that one place Dallas. From there the 65-year-old illustrator has worked for such publications as Rolling Stone, Time, and National Geographic. Because of those commitments, his drawings have appeared in Texas Monthly only twice over the past decade, a scarcity we hope will end with this issue. He says that projects like the one he did for the story on lieutenant governor Rick Perry (see “It’s Rick Perry’s Party Now,” page 150) are his favorite. “When they give you something and say, ‘See what you can do with it,’ that’s fun,” he says. Though caricature is one of Unruh’s specialties, he never thinks of himself as a caricaturist. “I just do a kind of likeness and put it on a strange body.” And he continues to do it all by hand, purposely avoiding computers. “I don’t even know how to turn one of those things on,” he says only half-joking. “They’re another good sort of pencil if that fits your way of working.”