The THE UNFINISHED COMIC BY JÚLIO SHIMAMOTO

The unfinished comic by Julio Shimamoto

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to reflect on the hallmarks of Júlio Shimamoto's creative process, based on the studies of Process Criticism. Shimamoto began publishing in 1957 and experimented with techniques, narratives and visual literacy in his work, which made him a frontier comic artist with several other artistic expressions. We accompanied the author of comics with a series of emails (2019 - 2023), received his originals for analysis through the author himself and finally, acquired a large part of his work published by commercial publishers to have a chronological basis of publication. In this article we propose the analysis of the comic “Sansão”, based on the production manuscripts and the author's comments. The comic book chosen is due to the fact that it is one of the most recent by the 84-year-old author and that it presents a critique of the process commented by the author himself, which, added to our research of his work, helps us to understand this continuous process and unfinished development of an author, who even in a country with few cultural policies to encourage comics managed to develop and create a fundamental visual poetics for other generations of comic artists, mainly for the fantastic genre, with an emphasis on horror. Thus, the course of the text includes a brief conceptualization of the Critique of the Process, an introduction to the artist Shimamoto and a technical and conceptual analysis of his comic “Sansão”.