( CNN ) -- With frizzy hair still standing to attention , North Korea 's Kim Jong-Il drops dead , narrowly missing the nuke button as he slumps face-down onto his desk . Welcome to the world of Patrick Chappatte -- a cartoonist whose knack for summing up major global events in a few simple brush strokes this week saw him become the first ever non-American to win the Overseas Press Club of America 's international cartoonist award . Chappatte will be familiar to regular readers of the International Herald Tribune , the global version of the New York Times , which prints his works of satire , slapstick and political comment on a daily basis . But while his day job is producing illustrations to match the headlines , Chappatte is one of a new breed of cartoonists who do their own reporting ; taking their sketchbooks and pens on to the front line of news gathering . Such `` graphic journalism , '' says Chappatte , is often the most effective way of telling a story in a digital age where people are bombarded with information from all directions . `` Cartoons in their simplicity can help tell news stories and I think we will be using them more and more because they have a very special effect on people , '' he told CNN by phone from Geneva , shortly before flying to New York to accept his prize . See a high-res gallery of Chappatte 's prize-winning cartoons . `` I personally feel the need to report and I feel that cartoons will help us in a world that is overwhelmed with videos and images where we 're dealing with so much information every day . '' Among the dozen or so cartoons for which Chappatte is being honored is `` Ground Zero of the Revolution , '' a striking example of graphic journalism for which he traveled to Tunisia to record the story of Mohammed Bouazizi , the man whose suicide sparked the Arab Spring uprisings . Chappatte also recently completed `` Death in the Fields '' a powerful animated film , produced with the International Committee of the Red Cross , that documents victims of cluster bombs in southern Lebanon . It is a project he hopes will lead to other similar work . `` People react very strongly in an emotional way in that kind of storytelling , so I see a lot of hope for that genre in the future , '' he said . Born in Pakistan to a Swiss father and Lebanese mother , Chappatte says he became an international cartoonist because he was an avid reader of newspapers in the numerous countries he grew up in . After placing his first cartoon ( about a man who broke out of jail for the seventh time ) in a local Swiss newspaper at the age of 20 , he worked his way to America , where he was employed first by the New York Times as an illustrator , then by Newsweek , which hired him to write a comic strip . Chappatte then landed the IHT job in Geneva just a few days before the attacks of September 11 , 2001 , an event which tested his ability to `` convey the feeling of America and the sense of the moment . '' He must have done something right because , as he points out with typical deadpan humor : `` They kept me . '' Chappatte puts his own success down to the ability to `` translate into a simple idea and a few brush strokes the gravity or the reality of things ... to show things as they are . `` When you look at it and say , that 's exactly it ! That 's the best compliment people can give me . '' This is no easy task , particularly when the internet exposes cartoons to global scrutiny , as was the case in 2005 when the Danish newspaper Jyllens-Posten sparked controversy and demonstrations throughout in the Muslim world by printing a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed . `` That was the 9/11 of editorial cartooning , '' says Chappatte . He says he is wary about causing outrage with his own work . `` We do n't all agree where the line is or where the balance is , '' he adds . `` I have a simple rule for myself . When I do a cartoon that can be seen as shocking for people , I want to be able to defend that cartoon eye-to-eye with the person that feels offended . '' While he describes the Jyllands-Posten episode as a `` controversy of the internet age , '' Chappatte -- who has just returned from a graphic reporting assignment on urban violence in Guatemala -- remains enthusiastic about the potential of cyberspace . `` The internet is full of possibilities in the language of cartoonists . You can do animated stuff and you can do multimedia stuff -- a whole new range of creativity . ''
Patrick Chappatte is the first non-American to win Overseas Press Club international cartoonist award . - The New York Times publishes a series of articles about the Vietnam War. Swiss-Lebanese cartoonist has also produced an animated film about cluster bombs .