Jeff MacNelly; Editorial Cartoonist, ‘Shoe’ Creator

Jeff MacNelly, the Chicago Tribune editorial cartoonist and creator of the “Shoe” comic strip whose deft caricatures and gentle wit earned three Pulitzers over a 30-year career, died Thursday of lymphoma at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

MacNelly, whose disease was diagnosed last year, died after being admitted to the hospital Friday for emergency surgery. He was 52.

He was one of the nation’s most widely read cartoonists. His editorial cartoons appeared in 500 newspapers, and “Shoe,” the loony strip about a treetop newspaper staffed by birds, was syndicated in 1,000 papers around the world.

“It’s a terribly, terribly sad day for cartooning,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Mike Peters, a longtime friend and the creator of the “Mother Goose and Grimm” comic. “He was to editorial cartoons what [Charles] Schulz was to comic strips. And Schulz was the best there ever was.”

In a business dominated by fierce liberals, MacNelly was something of an oxymoron--a conservative editorial cartoonist.

Vice President Al Gore was one of his favorite targets in recent months. In his last editorial cartoon, which ran May 26, he showed Gore and George W. Bush on horseback, with a bloated, half-dressed, jut-jawed Gore in the lead holding some polls but tangled in rope held by his Republican opponent.

He was kindest to John McCain, showing the maverick Republican in a cartoon earlier this year holding up a sign that read “Hell, no, I won’t go” next to a poster featuring Bush as Uncle Sam saying “Uncle George Wants You for Vice President.”

His sarcastic barbs were aimed at social foibles as well as politics, as in another recent cartoon showing a billboard outside a high-tech store pitching “The latest anti-virus device.” A man is walking out of the store carrying a fax machine.

MacNelly believed that the cartoonist, despite striving for imbalance and exaggeration, played a vital role in American journalism.

“We violate all the rules of journalism. We misquote and slander and distort,” he once said. “[But] the interesting thing is, the political cartoonist usually, if he’s any good, gets a hell of a lot closer to the truth than a responsible reporter.”

MacNelly was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island. He attributed his conservative outlook to his father, Clarence, a portrait artist who once was publisher of the Saturday Evening Post. He once said he owed his career to the moment his father handed him a box of crayons and requested a portrait. MacNelly was barely 4.

The budding artist attended Andover, the elite Eastern prep school. He went on to the University of North Carolina but flunked studio art and missed earning a diploma.

But he discovered cartooning in North Carolina, first for the campus newspaper and then for the Chapel Hill Weekly, whose editor, Jim Shumaker, would later provide the inspiration for “Perfesser Cosmo Fishhawk” in MacNelly’s “Shoe” strip.

In 1970 he joined the Richmond News Leader as its editorial cartoonist, winning his first Pulitzer there in 1972 when he was 24. He also won the Pulitzer in 1978 and 1985.

By 1980 he was on the cover of Newsweek as “the hottest of a new breed of artists changing the face--or at least the faces--of American politics.”

“He was one of the most talented cartoonists drawing today, no question about that,” said Paul Conrad, a cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times syndicate who, like MacNelly, holds three Pulitzer Prizes. “How he managed to do editorial [cartoons] and “Shoe” is beyond me. He had a marvelous sense of humor and I’ll miss him.”

MacNelly retired once--in 1981 when he was 34 years old and had spent 11 years at the Richmond paper. He wanted to spend more time on his strip and he was frustrated and bored by the Reagan era.

“The stuff that Reagan was trying to accomplish was stuff that I’d been yelling about for 10 years,” he said at the time. He found himself in a rooting position, and there was no yield in that for a political cartoonist who’d rather rip than root.

Yet his comic strip was “no substitute for reality and politicians,” he said. So, after 10 months of his retirement, MacNelly returned to cartooning at the Chicago Tribune.

MacNelly, 6 feet 5 and with a thick shock of white hair, was sometimes mistaken for a well-known TV personality. Times cartoonist Michael Ramirez, also a Pulitzer Prize winner, remembered standing on a Chicago street corner with him once when a man driving a van saw him and shouted, “Phil Donahue, you’re the biggest ----- I’ve ever seen.”

The cartoonist was “the nicest, most unassuming man you’d ever meet,” Ramirez said. But on this occasion, he played to an audience of shocked passersby, who also believed he was Donahue, and hurled expletives at the man in the van. Although he and Ramirez may have been the only ones laughing, the cartoonist couldn’t pass up the joke.

MacNelly worked in Chicago for many years, later moving to the Tribune’s Washington bureau. In recent years he lived in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia with his wife, Susie. In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sons, Matt, 13, of Singapore, and Danny, 25, of Providence, R.I. His oldest son, Jake, was killed in a mountain climbing accident in Aspen in 1996.

In 1991, MacNelly created another strip, “Pluggers,” based on readers’ submissions.

“Shoe” will continue to run, although the creative team for the comic has not been determined.