“Are you a late bloomer?” I ask.
“Definitely, yes, absolutely,” says 76-year-old Graham Harrop from his home studio in North Vancouver, where he works three days a week drawing editorial cartoons for the Vancouver Sun.
“Tonight, I’ll be watching the six o’clock news trying to see what’s in there that could make someone laugh. That’s the routine,” he says.
And if the evening news doesn’t inspire him, there’s always nighttime.
“It’s really hard to go to sleep some nights,” he continues. “I have a brain that’s quite active. I’m always thinking. I have a piece of paper by my bed and I often wake up at three or four in the morning to write something down. Usually it’s a thumbnail sketch or just an idea, and I elaborate on it the next day.”
Graham draws the cartoon by pencil slightly larger than what appears in the Sun and then finishes it off by going over the pencil lines with ink.
“After that it goes onto the computer where the cartoon gets coloured and then it’s sent to the paper.”
Successful, yes, but fame and fortune came later in life; the result of a journey disrupted by circumstance and missed opportunities.
“I would have made different choices, but you do what you do with the knowledge you have at that particular point. Why didn’t you do that? You could have done that. There were life lessons in regard to looking back,” he admits. But despite the setbacks, the cartoonist never took his eye off the prize.
Graham was born in Liverpool in 1944. Dad was a bricklayer, his mum a wife and mother to Graham and his siblings, a brother and a sister. When he was seven, the family moved to Egmont, BC and then to Saltery Bay, southeast of Powell River thanks, in part, to glowing recommendations from their relatives.
“My auntie Irene was a war bride, and she would write back home and tell us about Canada and how wonderful it was,” says Graham. “One of the letters she wrote back said her son, Keith, had his own pet deer. ‘Wow,’ I said to myself, ‘I gotta get over there and get a raccoon or something.’”
Graham doesn’t remember befriending a raccoon – “the closest I came was being bitten by a skunk,” he says – but he does remember creating a little newspaper called The Saltery Bay News with his cousin, Richard, at age 14.
“We drew it all by hand. We only had one copy and we would walk around the neighbourhood, stand at the door until [people] had read it and then move on to the next door. Rich and I would do the cartoons and write about things that happened in Saltery Bay.”
Drawing for a living was always in the cards.
“I was 10 when I knew I wanted to be a cartoonist,” he says. “I don’t know how but I just knew. I always loved drawing, even in school, you know sketching on the margins of my books and on the covers. It was always there.”
At 16, Graham left Saltery Bay for Vancouver and a job as a copy runner at the Vancouver Sun. In those pre-computer days, the copy runner literally ran copy from the reporter’s desk to the news editor. It was a menial job, but it introduced him to the newsroom and the Sun’s editorial cartoonist, Len Norris.
“I was never his assistant, but I got to meet him, and he gave me some pointers about cartooning,” says Graham. Norris encouraged him to take a correspondence course in commercial art. Graham complied and assumed some Norris-isms. Like his hero’s, Graham’s pieces are gentle not caustic.
“I like to make [readers] laugh, if I can, or chuckle within the context of what’s happening that day,” he says. “I’m really not trying to get a point across; I’m trying to find the whimsy in the situation. One might suggest [Norris’s] cartoons were also quite gentle, but he had a definite point of view. He expressed it in such a way that there were really no hard edges, nothing that was biting. He was almost kind on what the issue of the day was.”
Being in the presence of a legend was fortuitous, but at 18, young Graham had not yet carved out a name for himself. He returned to the Sunshine Coast where he worked in the local mill’s steam plant attending to and cleaning out the boilers. Three years later, he went back to Vancouver, determined to make a living by selling his cartoons to the city’s two dailies, the Vancouver Sun and The Province. But freelance gigs were spotty, and he augmented his income by selling hand-drawn greeting cards.
“I’m pretty sure I went to every office building in Vancouver,” he says. “I’d go up and down to different offices with my greeting cards, sell them for a dollar each. I was booted out of one or two offices in downtown Vancouver and took them out to the airport and got thrown out of the airport, too.”
And when that didn’t work, he sold original cartoons to tourists in Stanley Park.
“Nineteen dollars was my best day in Stanley Park. That meant I could get a room for the night.”
It was a situation that would depress most people or at least prompt a re-think. But not Graham.
“There was something in me that refused to give up, that it was going to work out.”
Persistent, yes. And courageous, too, but while tenacity kept him going, it also blinded him to other ways of achieving the same result.
“There were opportunities that were presented to me and, for whatever reason, I shied away from them. Was I ready emotionally? I really don’t know. That has certainly occurred to me.”
Things came to a head in 1977.
I was offered a job at The Province before the strike,” he continues. A steady job would have furthered his career and guaranteed a regular paycheque, but a dispute between management and the union over staffing resulted in an eight-month strike. When the smoke cleared, Graham elected not to pursue the offer.
“I didn’t go back to The Province. I continued trying to sell my work with the idea of children’s books or comic strips. So, there was an opportunity there. I had a chance, and I didn’t do it and I could have. It was a life lesson for me.”
When another opportunity presented itself, he didn’t shy away.
“I had submitted a cartoon strip to The Globe and Mail and they wrote back and said do you have any other samples? And, of course, over the years I had so many that hadn’t been published. I knew enough by that time that when The Globe was interested in my comic strip, you take it. You grab it and see where it goes. So, I sent them off to The Globe and they hired me to do a comic strip six days a week. It was a breakthrough. It was amazing. I was given great freedom. It was my first full-time gig as a cartoonist.”
The strip was called Back Bench and it was a series of single and multi-panel jokes satirizing Canadian politics. Poking the bear came easily to Graham. Being raised in a Liverpudlian family steeped in the British tradition of taking the mickey out of the pompous and the pretentious will do that to a person.
“That’s just how it was in my family, the quip and the quick retort. I just love that.”
Back Bench ran for 25 years in The Globe’s funny pages.
Today, Graham augments his Vancouver Sun job with a host of products, greeting cards, T-shirts and books. He dismisses his entrepreneurial spirit as an anomaly – “I’ve never been a great marketer. It’s just not in me,” he professes, but his website www.grahamharrop.com is a substantial enterprise.
Many of his books are theme specific, such as a nod to Canada’s sesquicentennial and The Little Thank You Book that honours Canada’s frontline COVID-19 workers.
His best seller is There’s a Spouse in the House, a whimsical look at retirement, not that Graham himself knows anything about retirement. Age? “I don’t feel it. I just don’t,” he says. Spouse was suggested by his brother, and Graham insists he’s recounting other people’s experiences, not his.
And then there’s Ten Cats, an online comic strip for which he won a National Cartoonists Award in 2013. Ten abandoned cats live in an old warehouse, where they’re looked after by a young girl called Annie. Graham likes cheeky cats. Chesney, the impertinent one, is a trouble- maker. Graham doesn’t own a cat. His partner Annie has a few, and it’s her cats that inspired the series. The felines may be fictional, but the content is pure Harrop – cheeky, ironic and gently sarcastic.
Graham says his product line is not about the money but about fulfilling one’s potential. He quotes motivational speaker Dr. Wayne Dyer.
“Wayne Dyer said, ‘don’t die with your music still in you,’ so if I do a book and I put it up and it sells two copies, for me, at least I did it. It’s the idea of doing it and putting it up while I still can.”
As for future endeavours, Graham intends to keep drawing for the Sun for as long as they’ll have him.
“That’s up to the Vancouver Sun,” he says, “but yeah, I’ll just keep going along.”
And if he has his way, he’d like to get his online comic strip, called UFO, syndicated in as many newspapers as possible. UFO takes place on a distant planet where well-known celebrities and politicians are “beamed up” to an alien hotel.
“I don’t know why that is. There’s a part of me that almost needs it to be in a newspaper. I guess I’m old-world to that extent, but the chances of that are sadly diminishing. It’s just not the same,” he says of the struggling newspaper industry. Times change. He knows that.
“There’s a lot of stuff in me that I have to get out,” he says. “I’m 76 and how much time do I really have?” Perhaps the memory of missed opportunities looms large. Perhaps it’s the edict from Dr. Dyer about fulfilling your potential.
“I don’t want to be whatever age, 85 or 90, and think I had a chance, and I didn’t do it. If these cartoons give people a laugh, then the better. A few strokes of the pen and then a funny line. It’s good for me to go to bed and think I did something.”
SNAPSHOT
If you were to meet your 20-year–old self what advice would you give him?
“When an opportunity comes along, take it. Flat out. Someone said if you don’t do it, it will stay with you the rest of your life and that’s true.”
Who or what has influenced you the most and why?
“There was a teacher in Grade 5, and I’ll never forget her. Miss Brown. She understood where I was coming from and really cared enough to encourage me to put my work up in the schoolroom. She was absolutely terrific, and my dad could draw horses’ heads, so my Dad, too.”
What are you most grateful for?
“Family, opportunity. Still being alive. I’m in good health and that’s something to be grateful for, too.”
What does success mean to you?
“Taking advantage of an opportunity that’s presented and running with it, even if you fall flat on your face. At the very least, you will know, at the end of the day, you did try.”
Photo Credit: Tom Gould
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