Oliver Gaspirtz is regarded as one of today's top cartoonists. His cartoons and comics have appeared in hundreds of newspapers and magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, SUN and National Enquirer, in dozens of books, including the New York Times best-selling book series, Chicken Soup For The Soul, and on countless websites, including BuzzFeed and Funny or Die. Deike Press, Germany's largest print media content syndication, distributed his cartoons to hundreds of German newspapers while King Features syndicate distributed them in the US.
Gaspirtz was born in Aachen, Germany and lived the first few years of his life in Belgium with his parents. They moved back to Germany when he was in third grade.
As a high school student in the late 1980s, Gaspirtz tinkered around with computers and started a video game development company called Amok Entertainment. He programmed a few games himself, and later acted as game designer and project manager for games like Pot Panic and Woody The Worm. Some of Amok's games were published by a subsidiary of Electronic Arts.
He also started an influential digital magazine published on floppy disc (not on paper), which was the first of its kind. It had the catchy title Sex'n'Crime, but it had nothing to do with either. It featured all the latest gossip from the computer scene. Many insiders consider Sex'n'Crime to be the grandfather of today's blogs. Initially the digital magazine was spread on floppy discs among insiders in the early scene, but later the magazine reached a much wider audience, when the floppy discs were also distributed at newsstands by Gong Verlag, Germany's largest magazine publishing house.
At the height of its popularity, Sex'n'Crime had over half a million readers around the world. It spawned an avalanche of copycats. After a while there were hundreds of digital scene mags. Even today, many years later, Sex'n'Crime's influence can still be seen in the hacking/demo scene. For example, the word graphician (a blend of the words graphics and musician, first used by Gaspirtz in his digital magazine) is still widely used among hackers today.
After graduating with a Bachelor's Degree in English literature and in German literature, Gaspirtz had planned to follow in his father's footsteps and become a teacher in Germany. Instead, he moved from Aachen to New York at the age of 20.
He began drawing cartoons for New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, a German-language newspaper based in Manhattan. It didn't take long until he was promoted to art director and oversaw the production of the paper. But he quit his day job at the newspaper just a few months later, when his first cartoon book, The Truth About Cinderella, was published. It wasn't a particularly good book but it reaffirmed his desire to be a freelance cartoonist.
Eventually his cartoons even ended up on display in a several museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in Tehran, Iran and the National Museum of Cartoon Art in Boca Raton. As much as he enjoyed the bohemian lifestyle of a freelance artist, the economic realities of being a freelancer forced him to take a 9-5 job again.
He began to work as production manager for a weekly newspaper in Brooklyn, and once again oversaw the pre-press production process, layout and art design of a newspaper.
Meanwhile he discovered the internet and started to publish his work on Gaspirtz.com and several other websites. His cartoons were some of the earliest content to go viral, and soon his cartoons were so popular on the web that he ended up making more money publishing his work online, than with his newspaper job. In May 2000 he quit his job as production manager and never looked back. He has been a freelance cartoonist and writer ever since.
His books are available on Amazon, Google Play Books, Barnes & Noble, Apple iBooks, Smashwords, Kobo, etc. Some of his writing has been widely quoted on social media, on websites, in books and magazines.
