Jeff MacNelly - Career

Career

MacNelly got a job at the Chapel Hill Weekly during his years at school in UNC. He worked there for the editor who became his mentor, Jim "Shu" Shumaker, also a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. Shumaker's impression on the cartoonist was so profound that MacNelly created the comic strip Shoe after "Shu," and the strip's lead character is based upon him. MacNelly considered his two years at the Chapel Hill newspaper to be what led to his "break"; his cartoons were picked up by newspapers across the state.

By 1970, MacNelly had become such a fine artist that he was hired by Ross Mackenzie at The Richmond News Leader in Richmond, Virginia to be their main illustrator and satirist. In less than two years in 1972, MacNelly won his first Pulitzer Prize, helping to put the small paper on the map. MacNelly's first son Jake was born that same year.

At this time, MacNelly was courted by various newspaper syndicates and journals to work for them, but he turned them down, preferring the slower pace of southern culture. In 1974, his second son Danny was born, and MacNelly was settling into being syndicated through the Chicago Tribune, while making the South his home. In 1977, he launched his first comic strip, Shoe, which was an immediate success. In 1981, he quit as editorial cartoonist at the News-Leader to focus on Shoe full-time, but found he needed to work in a newspaper office atmosphere to concentrate. In the 1980s, MacNelly moved to Chicago (to work for the Chicago Tribune) and eventually back to Virginia.

Shoe was syndicated in 950 newspapers by 1986, with millions of readers. A line of stuffed animals based on the cartoon's characters was produced. MacNelly also illustrated a book written by former Senator Eugene McCarthy and columnist James Kilpatrick, A Political Bestiary- Viable Alternatives, Impressive Mandates, and Other Fables.

MacNelly's editorial cartoons often appeared in book collections. When MacNelly represented the Irish Republican Army as a leprechaun that was a rat in one of his Chicago Tribune syndicated editorial cartoons after the IRA blew up a bus filled with schoolchildren, protesters objecting to the cartoon's contents picketed outside the Boston Globe's offices for three weeks. One of his most reprinted cartoons featured Mikhail Gorbachev with a birthmark in the shape of Afghanistan. MacNelly believed that in order to draw and write editorial cartoons, an artist had to have an opinion on the news, so he watched television news to gauge what other Americans were seeing and read the columns of Hugh Sidey, George Will and Meg Greenfield.

MacNelly said: "Cartoons are really a negative art form. You never say anything nice. You're always criticizing and dumping on people." Some of his most frequent targets were Jimmy Carter and Gorbachev. MacNelly was present when Gerald Ford fell and hit his head on a tarmac on an overseas trip in 1976: "I was the only cartoonist to see that, to actually see it. And all I could think of was, 'Gee, I hope he didn't hurt his head.' Meanwhile, back in the States, all my colleagues were doing Jerry Ford-falling-down jokes, and Chevy Chase started an entire career on it. I never did one. And I was the only guy that was right there. I missed the whole story, the entire point of it and everything."

In 1992, MacNelly met Chris Cassatt, a computer expert and cartoonist who became his assistant. Cassatt helped him change the way he worked by adding digitalization to his mediums. In 1992, MacNelly hired Cassatt full time, and they tele-commuted between Fishhawk Pass in Virginia and Cassatt's home in Aspen, Colorado. Also in 1993, on a suggestion from his wife Susie and long-time friend and Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, David Kennerly, MacNelly launched his strip Pluggers.