Vicar

Vicar was born on 16th April 1934 in Santiago de Chile as Victor José Arriagada Rios. After finishing school, design jobs financially put him through university, which he finished as a degreed engineer. In 1957, however, after winning a drawing competition, Victor decided to change careers and became Vicar. Henceforth he invented several comic strips for the big Chilean newspapers and also made some money as a political satirist. In 1960, Vicar moved to Barcelona, Spain, in hopes of furthering his career. There he was employed by Studio Bardón to work on comic series such as "Once Upon a Time", "Bang Bang Sam" and "Que Genté!". Additionally, he started working as a caricaturist for international publications such as the Playboy magazine, meanwhile writing and illustrating children's stories and helping to author and draw a cartoon movie. Finally, the Danish Gutenberghus, nowadays known as Egmont, contacted Vicar's agent in 1971 in need of new artists for their production of Disney comics. In the following decades, he became one of the best and most productive artists ever involved in the creation of the Duck adventures, having drawn more than 800 comics at over 10,000 pages total in 40 years. In 1975, Vicar moved back to Santiago, where he created a studio, Vic-Art, in which he employed two other illustrators to help him with his work. Vicar died after a long illness on 3rd January 2012. Stylistically, Vicar was very much inspired by Carl Barks' work, who he also named as his favorite artist. Having only attended one class at art academy, he was mostly self-taught. Barks, in turn, told Vicar and his Chilean colleagues at a public convention that he preferred Vicar's drawings to his own. Apart from two early stories, Vicar never wrote any plots himself, but constricted his work to illustrations, as he was always content with other authors' stories. His favorite characters were Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge.