SUMMARY IN ENGLISH

The comic has been one of the major players in the cultural development of the society in the twentieth century. Its heyday went on mostly at the beginning of this century, entertaining an audience hungry for information and marking an aesthetic trend within the market machine. Despite this, the comic does not have a prominent place in the plastic art. It might be because of its youth -it has a little over a hundred years old since its creation-, or the marginal importance given by the vast majority of experts in art. Even though in recent times, the comic, got some kind of recognition, its valuation still remains poor, below its alleged artistic, technical and plastic value. Surely its massiveness and lack of quality in print (in some cases) has helped to marginalize it.

Alberto Breccia, one of the masters of the comic book history will bring us, no doubt, to the highest artistic expression and expressiveness that this medium can achieve, leading us to a choice between art or commercial success that was the problematic of its life.
As we will see, Alberto Breccia did not hesitate to use the most advanced concepts and techniques in the art of his time, enriching and adapting them to his medium, the comic. His link to the image led him to seek the maximum visual variations, that caused repeatedly a marginality and lack of understanding of the viewer and publishers. The techniques of modern graphic prints gave him new openings, multiplied possibilities beyond the purely linear. If the comic is above all “image that tells” that tells something to someone on a first reading, a second understanding may carry ideas, messages, announcements or give account for; in Breccia we will find a committed communicational level, philosophical and political in his struggle to enrich the value of visual narrative. The resources used to seek a new aesthetic in the cartoon, were not limited to one style, he varied his plastic speech to levels of expressiveness never before seen in the comic.

In this thesis i propose to show that Alberto Breccia achieves aesthetic values required by the serious art, combining them with great skill to the language required by the cartoons.