 | ShoeOriginal Medium: Newspaper comics Distributed by: Tribune Media Services First Appeared: 1977 Creator: Jeff MacNelly image: © Tribune Media Services, Inc. |
The desks overflow with clutter. The personnel spend more time at the local watering hole than in the office. The editor is a cynical, overbearing tyrant and the reporter is a cynical, downtrodden serf. The whole scenario could easily have come from any journalism-comedy film of the past century or so, except for the fact that it takes place in treetops and the characters are all birds.
Shoe creator Jeff MacNelly was intimately familiar with
the newspaper environment — before starting the strip in
1977, he was a Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist. He continued to pursue
both endeavors until his death on June 8, 2000, garnering three
Pulitzers in all (1972, '78 and '85). He was also given the highest
honor a comic strip artist can receive, The Reuben Award for
Cartoonist of the Year, which he won in 1978 and '79. He's the
only person to win a Reuben two years in a row, a
feat made all the more impressive by the fact that those were only
the second and third years of Shoe's existence. (The only
other person to win two Reubens during his strip's first three
years is Bill Watterson of Calvin &
Hobbes, who by the way also started as an editorial
cartoonist.)
He also achieved a distinction not all that many comic strip artists can claim. He lived to see Shoe carried in over 1,000 newspapers.
P. Martin "Shoe" Shoemaker is the editor of The Treetop Tattler-Tribune. MacNelly named him after editor Jim Shumaker, his old boss at The Chapel Hill (NC) Weekly. But the strip's focus has shifted to reporter Cosmo "The Perfessor" Fishhawk, with a sidelight on The Perfessor's relationship with his nephew, Skyler. Both Perfessor and Shoe hang out at Roz's Roost, which is run by yet another cynical, hard-bitten bird of unspecified species.
Since MacNelly's untimely death (he was only 52), Shoe has been continued by his wife, Susan MacNelly; his former assistant, Chris Cassatt; and Gary Brookins. It took three people to fill his shoes on the Tribune Syndicate strip — but nobody will ever replace him on the Trib's editorial page.
