Patrick Chappatte

Patrick Chappatte drew a twice-weekly cartoon in the Opinion section of The New York Times International Edition, formerly known as the International Herald Tribune, which published his work from 2001 to 2019 (when the paper stopped publishing editorial cartoons altogether).[1][2]

Over the years, he has collaborated with editorial cartoonists in conflict-ridden countries with the goal of promoting dialogue through cartooning. These projects focused on Serbia, Ivory Coast, Lebanon, Kenya and Guatemala.[3] He described the work in a TED talk in 2010.[4]

Since 1995, Chappatte has worked in graphic journalism, or comics journalism, a genre of reporting using the techniques of graphic novels. His most recent stories covered the war in Gaza (2009), the slums of Nairobi (2010) and gang violence in Central America (2012). These reports were published in several newspapers, including the New York Times; one was turned into a short animated documentary[5] in 2011. (see below)

In May 2016, Chappatte (with his wife, journalist Anne-Frédérique Widmann) published "Inside Death Row," a five-part series published by The New York Times about the death penalty in the United States.[1]

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, Chappatte created a report in comic-book format: Death in the Field, which was published in Le Temps. The report was released in 2011 as an animated documentary.[6] It was aired on Swiss and French TV, toured documentary festivals, and won an award in Australia. Chappatte said the process of creating the documentary was both a personal and professional endeavor. "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."