Jeffrey Kenneth MacNelly (September 17, 1947 – June 8, 2000) was an American editorial cartoonist[1] and the creator of the comic strip Shoe.

The Wall Street Journal wrote: "MacNelly's superb draftsmanship as well as his heightened sense of the ridiculous is in the vanguard of a new generation of American cartoonists.

He joined the literary society St. Anthony Hall and worked as a sports journalist and illustrator (specializing in satire) for The Daily Tar Heel.

[1] The painting mysteriously disappeared in the 1980s and resurfaced in Massachusetts in 2008, when it was returned to the Carolina Inn and presented to the public for the first time at an official unveiling in January 2009, attended by MacNelly's son Danny.

In less than two years, MacNelly won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1972, helping to put the small paper on the map.

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.

I can't, but when people say Jeff has a special perspective on the world, they are engaging in heroic understatement.

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.

[2] 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.

[2] 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.

[2] 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.

Meanwhile, back in the States, all my colleagues were doing Jerry Ford-falling-down jokes, and Chevy Chase started an entire career on it.

"[2] In 1988, the Dayton Daily News reported that a cartoonist for the Ohio Republican Party named Ed Wilson drew cartoons which were "strikingly similar" and "virtually the same" to MacNelly's.

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.

He continued working in spite of his illness, producing Shoe and editorial cartoons and Dave Barry illustrations in his Johns Hopkins Hospital bed right up to the day he died, June 8, 2000.

This team keeps alive Jeff MacNelly's work on Shoe and Dave Barry's illustrations, as well as museum shows, fine art sales, licensing and publishing.