Victor Arriagada Rios (Vicar)

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Víctor Arriagada Ríos was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1934. In his youth, he studied electronic engineering at Universidad Técnica del Estado (the Technical State University of Chile), but became an illustrator/cartoonist instead.

He began his career drawing the title comic for the Mampato supplement of the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio, after which he joined the magazine Barrabases, for which he created the two series Locutín and Hipólito y Camilo in the 1950s. For his work, he won the Clarín Prize in 1956, and the Barrabases Prize in 1957, awarded by the Circle of Cartoonists.

The publication years are at the time of writing unclear, but in the following years, Vicar wrote the cartoons Quevedo (in El Pingüino), Frasecitas, Paquita and El Huaso Ramón. In the magazine Topaze he had El Paleta, a satirical series about president Jorge Alessandri. From 1959, he made several independent strips without a main character in the magazine El Saquero, el Deporte en Chunga, published by Pepo. In the early 1980s, his old series El Huaso Ramón, Quevedo and Paquita reappeared in the supplements of La Tercera. El Huaso Ramón was also collected in two albums called Ramón in 1989.

Between 1960 and 1965 Vicar lived in Barcelona, Spain. Here he was affiliated with the Bardon Art studios, an affiliation that lasted from 1960 to 1966, doing artwork for several foreign publishers. One of these was the Danish agency PIB, for which he drew Rasmus Klump (Petzi). He was also associated with Josep Toutain's Selecciones Ilustradas.

In 1970, Vicar started working on Disney comics, which he continued to do until his death in 2012. His first Disney comics were for the Danish publisher Gutenberghus (named Egmont today). Later, he assembled a group of artists around him, and founded the Vic-Art studios in Santiago. The style of the studio was fairly consistent and close to Carl Barks' art, and employed artists such as Héctor Flores and Raúl Bratesko. Vicar and his studio were highly productive, creating up to 200 pages a year.

While working on Disney comics, Vicar additionally contributed to the humorous magazine Ganso in late 1973, and between 1969 and 1976, he made the humorous comic strip Mitigüeso pistolero, published through Bardon (some sources claim the period to be 1973 to 1976, but the series was published in the Danish anthology series Seriemagasinet from 1969). In the early 1970s, Vicar also made the title comic for Guido Vallejos' magazine Viejo Verde.

Victor Arriagada Rios died of leukemia on 3 January 2012.

List of works/series


Date of birth: April 16, 1934
Place of birth: Santiago de Chile
Date of death: January 3, 2012
Country of origin: Chile


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