GenevaLunch (GL) editor Ellen Wallace met with Patrick Chappatte two weeks before Christmas at his office near Plainpalais in Geneva, where he was trying to juggle time for friends, family and journalists as the holiday rush began, with editors expecting the usual six cartoons a week.

In these days of dramatic if too often gloomy news, I told him I wanted a glimpse of his daily work life, but mainly his thoughts on his craft as we head into a future that many people worry is too uncertain.

GL carries his cartoons in English and occasionally in French, on Swiss and world affairs.

“The beauty of this job is that you never expect the next thing that turns up!” He becomes quickly animated as he talks about international affairs, for which he clearly has a passion.

“The big irony right now is that super-capitalism is begging for money from the State!”

Patrick Chappatte saves his sharpness and ability to get straight to the point for his cartoons: in person, he is a soft-spoken man with a gentle smile who looks younger than his 41 years. He is the multilingual editorial cartoonist for the International Herald Tribune (in English), Le Temps (in French) and NZZ Sunday edition (in German). And right now he is the author of two newly published books, a collection of his cartoons in English, Partly Cloudy, and another of his French cartoons, Super Contribuable.

The last time he and I met, in July, we sat at a sidewalk cafe in front of the apartment-turned-office that he shares. We drank mint tea and talked about how he is in many ways a typical GenevaLunch reader, with a multilingual and international background. He was born in Pakistan of a Lebanese mother and Swiss father, grew up in Singapore and Switzerland, settling in Geneva where he attended secondary school. He worked in the US for three years in his late 20s, for the New York Times as an illustrator and for other publications that included Newsweek. His working life has been a patchwork of time at the computer, as a reporter and reviewer, then as a cartoonist, with weeks on end exploring far reaches of the globe to gather material and enlarge his view of the world. Globe Cartoon is the apt name of his company.

That warm summer day, he mused about an upcoming trip to China as part of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders programme, wondering if it mattered that he had turned 40. A stream of students from nearby Unimail hurried by. He looked young enough to be one of them, but he was shaking his head in amazement as the conversation shifted to children and the high energy level of his oldest, an 11-year-old boy.

This December day, shoppers, students and business people hustle along the pavement in the cold outside as we sip coffee at his kitchen table and reflect on how and why we are burning the candle at both ends as the holidays draw near.

“Oh no,” he groans, as the camera came out. “I only had four hours of sleep last night! I haven’t shaved!” The office was piled high with books, newspapers and magazines, the organized clutter of an avid reader and researcher who is used to continual deadlines. Boxes of his newly arrived books sit on the floor.

He says he has always drawn, constantly. Do all children draw all the time, he wonders. Is there an age where they stop? He isn’t sure and says he watches his own children but doesn’t see drawing as something innate. His dreams when he was young didn’t include being a cartoonist. He simply drew.

“I wanted to be a train conductor,” he says, “and then I wanted to be a surgeon.” His mother might have preferred it if he’d become a surgeon, he laughs, “but I was always drawing, all the time – no vacation camps for me, no sports. During vacations I would draw from 10 in the morning until 10 at night.

“The big question was, would I do anything with it?” He was a good student, and he passed the tough Swiss university entrance exam, the Maturité, all the while sending his cartoons to local newspapers. “I was also working on an art supplement for La Suisse [ed. note: a Geneva newspaper that folded in 1994 after 96 years]. I was writing movie reviews, stories about local politics and culture.”

The busy student became a journalism intern for two years, which is how Swiss journalists generally get started, instead of going to university. The cartoonist at La Suisse left and the young Chappatte was ready to step into his shoes.

“But I missed out on university and yeah, I regret that. It’s a unique time in your life. Working as a journalist cut me off from my friends. You know, on a newspaper you work at night. I always have this feeling that I dropped out of school.”

He spent seven years with La Suisse, began to work for the news magazine l’Hebdo in 1990 and he worked three years for the Tribune de Geneve, working for French-speaking Switzerland’s major print media companies. Before he was 30 he had a career that would have been the envy of most wannabe cartoonists and his thirst for knowledge about world events certainly made up for any lack of university courses.

Patrick Chappatte interview, part 2

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