Profile

Photograph by Justin Lung

DRAWINGA CROWD

Harry Harrison has been making people, including Institute members, laugh on a daily basis. Jemelyn

Yadao talks to the cartoonist and illustrator about his life as a pithy political pundit, children’s

illustrator and periodical portrayer of accountants

38 January 2014

January 2014 39

Harrison makes light of the broadened role of internal audit inside companies.

“I didn’t really want to go back to the U.K. so I took a chance and came to Hong Kong.”

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42 January 2014

Profile

Harrison illustrates poor boardroom diversity in Hong Kong.

thought of generating my own take on a news story.”

With the collision of a United States Navy spy plane and Chinese fighter jet, the 11 September terrorist attacks and the eruption of violence between Israel and Palestinians, 2001 was a particularly tricky year for Harrison. His first cartoon for the paper was based on the foot-and-mouth outbreak in the U.K. and depicted a Chinese takeaway employee delivering sweet and sour pork being blamed for the fiasco by members of a cabinet meeting. “I’d like that year again, because back then I didn’t really get my head round it all. I would probably do a much better job now,” Harrison says.

Last month, the newspaper released its 2014 commemorative calendar featuring Harrison’s satirical cartoons covering news highlights of the past year.

Drawn to deadlinesIt’s not unusual for Harrison to work past 11 p.m. on a daily basis. He gets a rundown

of the day’s news at around 6 p.m. and a deadline of 11.30 p.m. The amount of time he needs to complete a cartoon to a good enough standard, he says, varies each day. “Once you read the news list, sometimes ideas pop up straight away and sometimes you sit there and keep rereading it and it’ll be about 8.30 p.m. before you send your first one in to the editor,” he explains. “I send them a few ideas each night, unless I’m lucky and they pick the first one.”

Despite the chaos caused by editors choosing a final cartoon too late, leaving him an hour or less to draw up the final piece, Harrison enjoys every minute of sat-irizing everything from the war in Iraq to Hong Kong elections. “I like working in edi-torial because it’s quick and dirty. You don’t have time to mess around,” he says. “If you spend too long, it’s no longer topical.”

Harrison has learned more about what it means to be a Hong Kong CPA since he started illustrating for A Plus in 2012. “They do a great job,” he says. “I’m a limited company and I’ve

got an honest CPA doing my books.”His personal favourite A Plus illustration

is of male board members sitting on the seesaw while a female member struggles to get on the other end. It was for an arti-cle exploring Hong Kong-listed companies diversifying their board composition. “I think that nailed the board diversity issue,” says Harrison. “I drew all the men in black and white to make them look even more arcane and no one asked me to make them look younger or cooler because they were representing the bad old days and probably because they weren’t accountants per se.”

Drawing for the Institute’s most recent Annual Report, he admits, was one of his most challenging jobs. “The challenges are to use humour in a way that’s acceptable to the profession,” he notes. “Everything had to be very above board and not subversive, so not my usual route.”

The Annual Report featured Harrison’s depictions of the Institute’s Presidents, Registrars and Chief Executives since 1973.

“If you draw someone who’s well turned out, then [the cartoon] would look like it could be anyone. [Hong Kong’s first Chief Executive] Tung Chee-hwa was perfect to draw.”

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Harrison recalls how the Institute’s founders put in place the first cogs in building Hong Kong’s economic miracle.

“The ones with glasses and beards were easiest, with-out a doubt,” he says.

“What I try to do is en-force my own impression of that person so that it becomes recognizable as them, even though it looks nothing like them.” Draw-ing good-looking people can be a struggle, he notes. “If you draw someone who’s well turned out, then [the cartoon] would look like it could be anyone. [Hong Kong’s first Chief Executive] Tung Chee-hwa was per-fect to draw.”

Being a satirical cartoonist, Harrison would always draw an accountant in the worst possible light unless asked to do oth-erwise, simply because that’s how his hu-mour works.

“My ultimate heroic accountant would be an overworked bespectacled man tapping away in a dingy office looking like he has the weight of the world on his shoulders,” he says. “Then there are the bad ones that pop up in the news from time to time – Enron comes to mind – who often have books and cooking equipment in their vicinity, and look either flashy, shifty or

‘creative’ in my normal cartoons.”Following in his parents’ footsteps,

Harrison encourages his children to be as artistic and creative as they can. His son has an interest in graphic design, while – just like her dad – his daughter is good at drawing. “I can tell she is quite passionate about it. She’ll spend hours drawing,” he says. “Unfortunately, they’re teenagers. I can teach my daughter all kinds of stuff but she doesn’t want to hear it from me,

but from someone else would be fine.”

When he’s not busy sketching, he plays the guitar and ukulele. He is currently in a country band on Lamma Island, where he lives, called the Yung Shue Wan

Curs. He plays the ukulele as part of a mu-sical duo called The Bearded Ukuladies.

Showing his personality through his drawings, however, is what gives him the most fun. “I’ve always enjoyed mickey-tak-ing and bar-style banter, and I’ve managed to get that into my cartoons and it’s great to be able to do that as a job,” he says, add-ing that “getting the elbow” when he was engaged was the best thing that’s ever hap-pened to him.