René Ríos Boettiger (Concepción, 15 December 1911 — 14 July 2000), also known as Pepo, was a Chilean cartoonist, creator of the famous character Condorito.[1] He has been credited as the most prominent Chilean graphic humorist of the 20th century.[2][3][4]
Biography
He was the son of the marriage of Amanda Boettiger Krause and the doctor René Ríos Guzmán.[5] He published his first cartoon at the age of 7 in the newspaper El Sur of Concepción.[5] Encouraged by his father, he continued with his drawings until he held his first exhibition, at the age of 10, at the Palet confectionery in his city.[6] Although he studied medicine at the Universidad de Concepción, Rios abandoned his studies in the early 1930s to devote all his time to creating his cartoons.[5][6] In 1932 he moved to Santiago to work as a cartoonist at the satirical magazine Topaze.[6] Adopting the pseudonym "Pepo" (from pepón, "little barrel", his childhood nickname), he created the comic strip Don Gabito for the magazine, a strip featuring a caricatured Chilean president Gabriel González Videla.[6] He also caricatured president Pedro Aguirre Cerda as Don Pedrito.[6]
In 1949[7][8] he created Condorito, his most famous character, taking the idea from the condor of the Chilean coat of arms.
Over the next sixty years Rios contributed cartoons to a great number of publications, including El Pingüino, Ganso, Pobre Diablo, Can Can, Pichanga, El Saquero, El Peneca, and branched out into other forms of illustration as well.[6][9] Rios died of cancer in 2000 at the age of 88.[10][11]
A great lover of the seaside, Rios often drew while looking at the sea at El Quisco on the Chilean Central Coast. A statue of Condorito now stands at the location. In 2000, an effort led by Omar Pérez Santiago (a scholar of Chilean cartooning and a co-founder of the academic Chilean Center for Comics) resulted in a sculpture of Condorito memorializing Rios being installed in the Chilean House of Culture in San Miguel.
References
^"Pepo". San Francisco: Goodreads, Inc. Retrieved 22 July 2020.