accomplished artist that he was hired by Ross Mackenzie at The Richmond News Leader in Richmond, Virginia to be the newspaper's main illustrator and satirist. 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. In 1974, MacNelly was settling into being syndicated through the Chicago Tribune, while making the South his home. MacNelly's editorial page editor at the Chicago Tribune, Jack Fuller, said in 1986 that MacNelly's editorial cartoons were "magic... I wish I could say just what combination of graphic mastery, writing skill and sheer perversity goes into Jeff's work. I can't, but when people say Jeff has a special perspective on the world, they are engaging in heroic understatement." 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."