I’ve always had an obsessive quality, especially about my work.

I guess you need that, if you’re going to draw as many drawings as I have.

Or if you’re going to build a great business or long-term project or whatever.

I like the idea of this print, hanging up in someone’s office, reminding him or her about why they work differently than everybody else.

Why they get to see and do the stuff everybody else does not.
And why, deep down inside, it’ll pay off one day.

Hell, yeah…

After this cartoon went out in the newsletter earlier this year, we received a number of emails from people asking for female version. Here it is!

I think the Buddhist in me came out in this one. So much human suffering is tied to hanging on to things; material, emotional, or otherwise.

I believe that happiness comes from inside us - We often forget that, and spend a lot of time blaming other people for our unhappiness.

The commentary on the original image read:

“If you’re unhappy, nine times out of ten it’s because you’re clinging onto something.

Nine times out of ten, happiness and letting go are synonymous.”

Exactly.

[You can buy the print here etc.]

[Sent out in yesterday’s newsletter. Buy the print here etc.]

Lots of people ask where the gapingvoid.com name comes from. Here you go, the cartoon was originally published in the Austin Chronicle, while I was attending University of Texas. The fellow peering into the viewer is Gloop, I still draw him today, when I need a kinda lumbering, human, compassionate, slightly pessimistic character.

gapeintothevoid.com was too long, so I shortened it. The rest, as they say, is history.

The original hangs in the downstairs bathroom in my mother’s house. She was an early fan. Thanks, Mom!

[Sent out earlier in today’s newsletter…]

I am fortunate to have lived in Britain. It taught me JUST HOW DIRE some office parties can be. They have Christmas-office-party direness down to an art form. So I wanted to make a Xmas cartoon that paid tribute to that. With a great deal of affection, I might add…

The sentiment of this cartoon is so self-evident, I don’t think there’s much need to paraphrase it. Suffice to say, I am reminded of an old Kung Fu maxim:

“Everybody wants to be like Sifu (i.e. teacher). And what does Sifu do? That’s right. She teaches.”

Make of that what you will…

[Sent out in today’s newsletter…]

[Sent out on the gapingvoid newsletter:]

We are living in a world that gets weirder all the time, especially this time of year.
So much of people’s day to day satisfaction comes from consumption, that it’s becoming harder and harder to remain objective about what matters.

We love our gadgets, we love our cars. We love our stuff. Where does this all lead?
One thing you can do around products though, is to use them as a vehicle for creating community.
Whether we like it or not, ALL community has love baked in there somewhere, even if you can’t always taste it. Maybe that is the upside here?

Even in the non-romantic usage, “Love” is a highly loaded word. Dynamite. Nitroglycerin. It’ll burn your eyes and then your skull.

But we wouldn’t have it any other way.

[Buy the print…]

[Buy the print here etc.]

This is a poster I did for Prepara, the cooking utensil maker. They’re a client of my client, Rackspace. Basically, Rackspace was commissioning me to create a little goodwill gesture, a little social object for one of their favorite customers etc.

I was trying to capture Prepara’s schtick in a single drawing. I follow the art gallery scene, I follow the industrial design scene. Pound for pound, the latter inspires me more often, more consistently. The combination of love and utility is a powerful one. Combined with something so basic and primal as eating, even more so.

[The “Commission Hugh” page etc.]

Hewlett Packard is kicking off its cybersecurity conference today, HP Protect 2011, and they kindly hired gapingvoid to design some posters for them.

Basically, I wanted to draw something kinda cool n’ fun, something that computer security people wouldn’t mind taking back home and hanging on their office walls.

To the uneducated, the cartoon might seem trivial, but actually, it’s not. Like Lennie Bruce famously said, “Humor is serious business”.

Fred Wilson is right, we are indeed in the middle of a major, long-term, global trasformation, and Obama (or anybody else who wants his job) is NOT, REPEAT NOT going to save us.

So what IS going to save us? The SAME DAMN THING that has ALWAYS saved us:

That’s right. The Play Ethic. Creativity. All that good stuff Sir Ken talks about. All that good stuff that gapingvoid hopefully represents.

All serious work begins with serious play first. AND NOT the night before, but FIRST thing in the morning.You think Jony Ives works for a living? Hell, no, he plays for a living. So do I. So do my friends, Charles Hope, Seth Godin and others like us.

And YES, you can bring that sense of play anywhere– to a conference on cybersecurity, for example. Don’t get me wrong; cybersecurity is also serious business. Our collective safety and our livelihoods as citizens depend on it, and companies like HP work to help protect our culture’s critical infrastructure systems and generally keep us out of trouble.

It’s a nasty, dangerous world out there, after all…

That being said, security nerds are also people who like to play and get paid for it, more than most. They like to have FUN, at conferences and anywhere else, of course they do. Who says the good guys cannot be sweaty and unshaven? News to me. To PLAY means to HACK something. Hacking is INHERENTLY playful. Of course it frickin’ is.

[Note to non-Nerds: the reason that nerds don’t spend a lot of time on their personal appearance is because they’d rather spend their brief time here on Earth, working on something that actually matters to them, not spend it on something that matters to the usual crowd of clueless, superficial, hipster knuckleheads.]

Thanks to Hewlett Packard for giving gapingvoid the opportunity to live in a place it hasn’t yet i.e. the complex and mysterious world of cybersecurity i.e. the world where the hackers live and thrive happily. It’s good to know that some of them are on our side. So far, it’s been a blast. Rock on.

[Bonus Link: The ever-brilliant Ben Hammersley gave a great talk to a bunch of high-level UK cybersecurity nerds recently. A wonderful read.]

[The “Hire Hugh” page etc.]

Voice Of God [Buy the print here etc.]

As an artist, you’re always asking yourself, well, what’s the point?

Decoration? Illustration?

No, it’s something deeper… even if that deeper thing evades us, the VAST majority of the time.

I drew this cartoon to remind me, us, of that deeper thing. Why, as artists, we choose to spend our brief time here on earth.

Exactly.

[This cartoon was sent out yesterday in the newsletter etc…]

NEVER GO MAINSTREAM

Back when I was a kid and aspiring to be a professional cartoonist one day, I had this dreadful fear hanging over my head:

That the only way to become successful as a cartoonist, was to go mainstream. Cute and cuddly, warm and fuzzy. In the world of the big money cartooning, there was little room for “Edge”.

Check out the traditional US Sunday comics section of any newspaper, and you’ll see what I mean. Utter, cutey-pie dreck.

I just couldn’t see myself doing it. My stuff was just too “out there”, and when I tried to reign it in, it just made it worse.

Of course, that was before the Internet came along and changed everything…

Anybody who courts the mainstream deserves everything they get. There’s far more action in niches.

So somebody asked me recently in an email interview, “What’s next for Hugh MacLeod?”

Which I answered:

There is no “Next”. There is only making more drawings and writings, and trying to stay healthy and happy. “Ambition” is for amateurs.

I think it’s too easy to confuse the AMBITION of doing something, with the actual DOING of something.

That confusion is the domain of the amateur…

THE KING

The thing about the pawn and the king in this cartoon is… well, they’re both right.

The good news is, they’re just not both right all the time.

People often think that the moment they get to the top, their problems are over. History tells us the opposite, the Roman Emperors who lasted more than a couple of years before being assassinated or killed in battle were the minority.

[This cartoon went out in the newsletter earlier today. You can buy the print here etc.]

One day I drew a fun little picture of a whale, just for the hell of it.

Then I added a line about “meaning” that I had written on Twitter earlier that day, just for the hell of it.

Somehow it worked.

Hey, I like whales…