Patrick Chappatte

Patrick Chappatte (known simply as Chappatte in his cartoons) is a Lebanese-Swiss cartoonist who draws for Le Temps, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Sunday edition) and the International Herald Tribune. He is a prototypical global citizen, from a Lebanese mother and a Swiss father, born in Karachi, Pakistan in 1967, but raised in Singapore and Switzerland, he also worked as an illustrator for the New York Times and as cartoonist for Newsweek. Many of his cartoons reflect events in Swiss and international news, such as the 9/11 attacks, the rise of the Swiss People's Party, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Chappatte as humanitarian correspondent

Chappatte went to southern Lebanon in 2009, where people still live with the threat of actual time bombs, in the form of cluster-munition bomblets. While there, the editorial cartoonist created a report in comic-book format : Death in the fields. The report will be released in 2011 as an animated documentary..

Chappatte said the process of creating the documentary was both a personal and professional endeavour. "I have a Swiss father and a Lebanese mother, so I wanted to better understand the problems that the people of Lebanon are still facing, long after the fighting stopped," he said. "I also wanted to use my craft as a cartoonist, my experience as a journalist and my sense of satire to create a new kind of prism through which to view forgotten conflicts and a new technique for revealing the humanity behind the story."

External links

• Chappatte's website
• An interview with Chappatte over the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons
• Chappatte's TED talk 2010: The power of cartoons