Continued from Interview, part 1

. . .

“By then I wanted to quit cartooning here. I wanted to work with American newspapers – I thought they were the best [cartoonists]. And they’re still the best!” The boyish grin returns. “And if you’re going to have a 30s crisis, it’s not bad to do it in New York!”

The three years he spent in New York were a turning point for Chappatte. “I’m much happier now than before I was 30. I feel like I’m freer. It’s really refreshing when this happens – I was treated like a beginner and I loved it. I was starting all over again.”

He traveled for four months in an old van across the United States, ending up in New York. “You know, the New York Times doesn’t have a political cartoonist. So I thought I would convince them. Let’s do it the American way, be very brazen, I thought!” The newspaper, the largest in the US, has 12 art directors. Chappatte says he loved the fair-chance, organized approach for artists who are trying to get work, with drop-off and pick-up days for each of the directors. It’s a far cry from Paris, he says, where knowing people who know the right people counts for everything.

”The guy I met confirmed what I knew, he said we never have political cartoonists. But we have work for illustrators. They give you a text and you illustrate it. I did a lot of book review illustrations. It can’t be cartoony art: that’s seen as offensive.”

His relationship with the art director at the New York Times was good and after a while, he says, he was able to say he didn’t want to illustrate fiction books.

”So I got back to what I like in the end” he laughs. Working as an editorial cartoonist, what I do now, has great freedom.”

Ever polite, he offers another coffee and debates whether or not he should be living on caffeine for the day. He decides against it.

I reflect on how a Swiss newspaper recently ran a profile on him, with photos mainly of his hands, implying that they are always busy. In fact, he is not a fidgety person and you don’t feel that he’s always itching to put his hands to work. On the other hand, he doesn’t like being photographed, or having his surroundings shown to the world. He prefers to let his cartoons speak for him. When I once teased him that we should run photos of plush red and purple satin pillows to hint at his non-Swiss side, he laughed. The office is in an old Geneva building, with dark wood and white walls dominating, no fancy cushions in sight.

”The job of a cartoonist -” and he searches for the words “- I don’t see how you can do it, the same thing, year after year, without losing your edge. I’ve found it again each time I had a new audience.”

He left New York in 1998 to return to Switzerland, fired with new ideas. He began to work as a cartoonist for Le Temps, the top daily in French-speaking Switzerland, which had just been born of the merger of the Nouveau Quotidien and the Journal de Geneve. In 2001 he began to work for the International Herald Tribune (IHT).

The work did not fall into his lap.

”I had to convince them. They were just using syndicated cartoons. The guy said, ‘If you’re trying to convince me to hire a political cartoonist, forget it.’ So all the way to Paris in the TGV I thought of all these arguments, why they needed [an editorial cartoonist]. I think that’s the beauty of the American mind. You can convince people. He took five minutes to give me all the reasons why not, and I spent five minutes giving him all the reasons why. In the end he said, ‘Good, let’s go ahead.’

”For the IHT I didn’t have to adjust much because I was already interested in international politics. And I was already influenced by the American style.”

One of his convincing arguments at the IHT editorial offices had been his location in Switzerland, his Swissness. “Europe is in the middle of [international events] and I feel we really have a special chance here in Switzerland, where we’re in the middle of Europe but we’re so tiny, especially in the French area, that we’re always looking out at the world! We’re surrounded by France, Germany, Italy, large countries that have a strong point of view. You know, on my travels, I’m always amazed at the number of Swiss people you meet, everywhere. We have all this education and wealth, all the tools you need in life, and those are all good reasons to want to escape! So we go see the world.”

And being from Geneva, which Chappatte describes as an “open city” where the world is concerned, is an added bonus. “I belong to Geneva,” he says simply.

His art and his work methods have progressed considerably in the 10 years he’s been back. “My style has evolved. And with experience you get much faster. I can squeeze in much more now. I have three kids, I can travel.

”But I still take a lot of time. It’s laborious work. I still have this approach of doing it well.”

I remind him that he told me a few months ago that he spends about six hours per cartoon, looking for ideas, researching, drawing. He reflects for a moment.

“The temptation is always there to do it faster. I still take one to two hours just looking for ideas. And maybe 60% of the time my first idea is best, but 40% of the time the second one is more refined, so I always try to do more.”

Conversation returns to the challenge of staying inspired, keeping the essential edge.

”You cannot become a chief cartoonist!” This is not a career with a ladder and a top run, he argues, but rather an art form that requires constant feeding and inspiration. “If you have passion you can continue, but you also have to have other passions. I want to do more graphic reporting, comic journalism,” and he points to American journalist Joe Sacoo as a leader in the field that the provocative journalism publication Mother Jones describes as a “no-man’s-land between underground cartoonists and war correspondents.” Chappatte says with admiration, “To do Bosnia through the eyes of the victim: that is very powerful.”

He has published his own comic journalism in Le Temps, writing and drawing about Ivory Coast rebels. He did a comic journalism report in March 2008 for the IHT  on Iran. He would like to do more. “The idea is to be subjective, to show myself [as part of the situation he's reporting]. I would have liked to do Obama’s campaign” but even with major publications behind him, it was impossible to get a place with the team. Obama’s loss, I think to myself.

But he’s not a man who looks back. He’s already planning his next trip, a surprise destination.

Until you read about it, check out the rich vein of his comic journalism at Globe Cartoon.

Related:

• “A hilarious antidote to Christmas overeating,” GL book review blog by Shirley Curran (review of Partly Cloudy)
• GL resource listing for Partly Cloudy (where and how to buy it)

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