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 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. The party subsequently fired Wilson. 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. Later career and legacy One of MacNelly's friends and colleagues at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Gary Brookins, had assisted MacNelly in filling in doing finish work. Brookins was a fan of Pluggers and could replicate MacNelly's style. Exhausted after his son's death, MacNelly gave the strip to Brookins to take over in early 1997. Pluggers was produced by Brookins until 2020, after which it was handed over to Rick McKee; it is syndicated in more than 60 newspapers in the United States. In the late 1990s, MacNelly began to also put more concentration into fine art painting and sculpture. He did a caricature of the Louisiana cartoonist Pap Dean. By 1999, he had almost finished passing the task of creating Shoe onto Cassatt, Susie MacNelly and Brookins. Then, in December 1999, MacNelly was diagnosed with lymphoma. 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. MacNelly's legacy is continued through the work of Chris Cassatt, Gary Brookins, Susie MacNelly, his head writer Bill