Fritz Gareis

_{Vienna 1872 - 1925 Vienna}

Austro-Hungarian artist Fritz Gareis was born in Vienna in 1872. His father of the same name was also a painter. Gareis used his artistic talent to be a landscape and genre painter, but was also very much invested in applied graphical work. During World War I he contributed to the Imperial Austro-Hungarian war by creating donation stamps, propaganda postcards and posters. He was also working as cartoonist for different satirical magazines such as Die Muskete or the leftwing Vienna magazine Götz von Berlichingen where he published his famous comic Bilderbogen des kleinen Lebens from 1923 until his death about the mundane ins and outs of the fictitious Riebeisl family. Incidentally, this comic strip was the first one to use speech balloons in Germany and actually might be the first one to do so on a regular basis in continental Europe.