Jeffrey Kenneth "Jeff" MacNelly (September 17, 1947 – June 8, 2000) was an American editorial cartoonist and the creator of the comic strip Shoe. After Shoe had been established in papers, MacNelly created the single-panel strip Pluggers. 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." Early life MacNelly was born in New York City in 1947 and grew up on Long Island. MacNelly's mother was a retired journalist. His father, C.L. MacNelly, ran an advertising firm, and was the publisher of the Saturday Evening Post from 1964 to 1968. MacNelly was educated in his teens at Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, where he was a class clown and decided to be an illustrator. He graduated in 1965 and went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He joined the literary society St. Anthony Hall and worked as a sports journalist and illustrator (specializing in satire) for The Daily Tar Heel. He considered himself to be a horrible sportswriter, but his illustrations for the paper were well beyond the ability of an average art student. His work for the college's newspaper led to work at the Chapel Hill Weekly. MacNelly dropped out just shy of getting his bachelor's degree in 1970. In 1969, MacNelly was commissioned to paint a representation of the Carolina Inn, which became an "iconic" image representing the Chapel Hill campus hotel and appeared on promotional brochures and menus issued by the inn in the ensuing decades. 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. 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, who was 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 an