Editorial cartoonist Jack Ohman is good at skewering whatever he targets in his cartoons, a talent recognized by the honors he has received, including the Pulitzer Prize a decade ago and the Herblock Prize this year.
Most people in Davis know him for the cartoons he drew for the Sacramento Bee for a decade. But Davis and longtime local journalist Bob Dunning also helped Ohman save his career, he says today on Davisville.
Three years ago McClatchy, which owns the Bee, fired Ohman and the company’s two other editorial cartoonists, saying it didn’t want to run daily editorial cartoons anymore. Ohman, then 62, joined the San Francisco Chronicle part-time as a columnist and cartoonist, and a larger recovery followed when he launched You Betcha!, a Substack home in 2024 for his cartoons and columns. He got advice from Dunning and others — Dunning, of course, launched his own Substack after the Davis Enterprise cut him loose two years ago, and quickly surpassed the salary he’d lost.
Other topics today: How Ohman works; developing a meta sense of San Francisco from regular meetings with Willie Brown; fishing; becoming a political columnist; and his project, currently idle, to write a graphic personal memoir of the Apollo 11 moon landing 57 years ago this month.
