Product Description

Shoe is cartooning at its best. The strip captures issues and ideas that speak to a wide and diverse audience. It conveys volumes through its humor and simple lines. The First 27 Years of Shoe: World Ends at Ten, Details at Eleven exhibits that clarity and cartooning essence in frame after frame, strip after strip. The first Shoe collection of Jeff MacNelly and company's works since 1994, this book is a delight from Dave Barry's foreword to Mike Peters's "backward."Edited by Chris Cassatt and Susie MacNelly, who along with Gary Brookins keep Shoe as lively, vital, and vibrant as Jeff did until his death in June 2000, The First 27 Years of Shoe contains hundreds of cartoons from 1977 to the present. Plenty of MacNelly extras pepper the book, including actual (and critical, of course) notes from Jeff's teachers, as well as photos and warm remembrances of the creative genius who won three Pulitzer Prizes for his editorial cartooning and two Reubens, cartooning's highest award, for Shoe.Best of all, though, The First 27 Years of Shoe includes just that: year after year of Shoe, Perfesser Cosmo Fishhawk, Skyler, and Roz-along with Senator Batson D. Belfry, Irving Seagull, Wiz, Loon, and more-squawking, diving, and flying hard through life's ups and downs. Through the decades Shoe has proven both successful and memorable, a tribute sure to be shared by this MacNelly collection.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #601044 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 216 pages

About the Author
Jeff MacNelly may not have impressed his boarding-school teachers, but just about everyone after that period stood in awe of his drawing, observation, and general creative abilities. Few people could do as much using both line and word. Susie MacNelly, Jeff's wife and stepmother to his kids, and cocreators Chris Cassatt and Gary Brookins keep Shoe hopping with consistently fresh material and lively art. Shoe now appears in 650 daily and Sunday newspapers around the world.

Customer Reviews

Waiting For The Other Shoe To Drop!!!
27 Years of Shoe chronicles the cartooning career of cantankerous Jeff MacNelly's premier strip, and for the most part, his widow Susie and his former colleagues have done an impressive job. We see the early 70's Shoes, with MacNelly taking his baby steps as a stripper, the glorious 80's panels where the master truly hit his stride, his 90's output, with the characters still wonderfully out-of-place as the new millenium approaches, and the post-MacNelly Shoes, with Messers Gary Brookins, et. al, doing a very good job of keeping up the standard MacNelly's readers have come to expect. Also, plenty of extras in this volume, including contributions from Dave Berry and Mike Peters, and a touching tribute to Jeff's talented namesake son, who also died too soon. All in all, a fine collection, to be sure. So why only four stars? Well, perhaps the answer can be found by viewing the strip today in your local newspaper. Brookins, et al, have done a fine job recreating the look and feel of MacNelly's world, but it seems they believe that the strip is best driven by jokes rather than the delightful characters who deliver them. Case in point: an early MacNelly strip from the 70's has Cosmo talking to a store clerk about his garden. The clerk says, "I can get you a truckload of horse manure real cheap." Cosmo answers, "My garden is not that large." The clerk replies, "Okay, I'll make it a truckload of mouse manure." Now, there is nothing wrong with jokes in a comic strip (in fact, it often seems these days that the funny pages aren't so funny any more), but such an "old groaner" of a gag is atypical of MacNelly's style and not as funny as the situational humor that usually drove Shoe while he was still alive (he died in 2000). One of my very favorite strips (sadly, not reprinted in this edition) concerns bachelor Cosmo coming home and announcing to his empty apartment that he will whip up a gourmet extravaganza for dinner. As he decides that such an undertaking is too much effort, he keeps simplifying his meal preparation until he is finally left to eating leftovers off his open oven door because he is too lazy to clear off the table!! Such a "chamingly rumpled" character and the strip itself were the perfect antidote to the Eighties emphasis on consumption. Sadly, this volume seems to shortchange this decade (his best) in favor of reprinting too many strips from the Nineties, a decade where his skills had declined from sheer genius to mere excellence. Still, there are plenty of goodies from his best decade (in one, Cosmo calls to Roz the friendly tavern owner, "Roz, beer all around"; the next panel shows only himself, surrounded by some twenty or so beers, the very picture of contentment!) For the most part, you will be content with 27 Years of Shoe as well; get it today and raise a glass in tribute to one of the true greats of the cartoon world: the late, great Jeffrey MacNelly.

Very enjoyable!
We liked the 27 Years of Shoe very much. It is very humorous. The author has a great sense of humor. The book is a very good read.

For fans of Shoe
This is a nice collection of Shoe over the years, and really for fans of the comic strip rather than a more general audience. Of course, several of my favorites are not present, but the quirky characters are well represented. A surprise was a page of repetitions which was unexpected. The size of the book is a bit awkward for a bookcase. The book is divided by decades, and there are thumbnail pictures of MacNelly and friends, family, and pets.