Of the cartoonists of the 20th century, Jeff MacNelly was a very influential one. He won three Pulitzer Prizes for editorial cartooning – his first in 1972 when he was only 24. He was also twice awarded the National Cartoonists Society’s top price The Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year in 1978 and 1979.
He created the comic strip Shoe in 1977 and produced it up until his untimely death in 2000. To those who have studied his work, he had a gift in both artistic talent and writing that surpassed most that pick up the pen and ink.
Through the generosity of a supporter of The Daily Cartoonist, I have the privilege of offering to one lucky reader an original Shoe comic strip that ran April 29, 1986. You can see below a scan of the strip. What is remarkable, and I’m told this is how he drew his strip, he’d use a light blue outline for composure but then “go straight to ink and brush.”
Because this is a unique and irreplaceable piece of original art, I’m going to treat this a bit differently on the Indiegogo campaign. I have no mechanism for auctioning it off within Indiegogo, so I’m going to conduct a reverse auction (probably not the right term, but let’s run with it.)
Today I’ve created an perk with MacNelly’s original art with a value of $550. Each day the incentive isn’t claimed with a donation, I’ll retire the perk and create a new one with a value $25 less than the previous day. So in essence – each day the “price” decreases $25 until someone claims it with a donation to the campaign. Your gamble is the longer you hold out for a lower donation amount, the more likely someone will claim it before you.
Without a doubt Jeff was one of my biggest influences – not just in artistic style, but as an introduction to editorial cartooning and comics. I’ve had the privilege of holding a few of his originals in the Ohio State University Cartoon Library and they really are art. Don’t wait too long to claim this perk.
That went fast!
Gone.
That was priced way too low.
Hey I just got here! Can you start over?
Oh man…yeah should have priced that much higher…I did like the reverse auction idea.
There was an auction?
I knew it would go fast, but not that fast.