Shum’s life seems straight out of fiction, but it is real. It is not strange then that his figure has ended up becoming the protagonist of a novel, a graphic novel in this case. Shum, el dibuixant de les mans trencades (Pagès Editors) is a comic that combines biography and journalistic reportage with the history of the anarchist movement and the Catalan satirical press. A work written and drawn by Jaume Capdevila, alias Kap, who in this way combines his role as a student of graphic humor with his career as a cartoonist and humorist in media such as La Vanguardia or Mundo Deportivo.
Shum, el dibuixant de les mans trencades is a rigorous work narrated with talent and passion at the same time. Able to summarize a complex story in a few pages and yet read with the fluidity of a thriller. But Kap – or Capdevila – manages to convey, beyond some vital adventures that are truly movie-like, a story that encompasses much more and contains countless nuances. It deals with the workers’ struggle, torture, the anarchist and libertarian movement, poverty in Barcelona at the beginning of the 20th century, gunmanism in the streets of the Catalan capital, Paris as an example of modernity…
And, of course, this book also talks about drawing as a tool of ideological combat, drawing as protest and as a critique of power. Of humor and satire. And that is where comics and essays merge in sequences where Shum’s drawing slips between Kap’s vignettes in the same way that press clippings, documents and drawings by other artists are integrated. A patchwork that contributes to giving depth to this graphic novel and that confirms the plastic and narrative flexibility that the comic language has.
Shum was one of the most active and most personal cartoonists on the Catalan artistic scene prior to the Civil War. His drawing was minimalist and sharp. His characters were geometric, almost cubist, his compositions were very modern and the line of his drawings was bent as if it were a wire. He published in magazines such as Papitu, L’ Esquella de la Torratxa, L’ Opinió or La Humanitat. During the Republic he was a member of the museum board and participated in the cartoonists’ union. But Shum’s life has another side, more complex and unknown, full of shadows and contradictions, full of false clues that were accepted for decades.
Until 1979, the signature Shum was considered to be the pseudonym of Joan Baptista Acher or Joan Baptista Cuchard, also known as The Poet, although he did not write poetry, he drew jokes; one more element that plays in favor of confusion. It was not until that moment when it was learned that behind the Shum signature was actually an author from Lleida called Alfons Vila Franquesa (1897-1967).
At the age of 12, after the death of his mother, he left home and moved on foot to Terrassa and, later, to Barcelona. There he came into contact with anarchist groups, participated in an attempted attack with a homemade bomb and was involved in the accidental detonation in a floor where explosives were manufactured. That happened on May 2, 1921. Five people died in that accident and Shum suffered injuries so serious that they almost ended his life.
He was arrested, tortured and sentenced to death after a trial full of irregularities. A large international solidarity movement was organized to have the death sentence commuted to life imprisonment and he was finally pardoned and released in 1931 thanks to the establishment of the Second Republic. The anarchist leaders had turned Shum into an icon of the fight against the reign of Alfonso XIII. The explosion, torture and prison marked his life: he emerged from the fire with his hands burned; From the torture he emerged with broken hands. His obsession was always to draw again. And he got it. At the end of the Civil War he went into exile in Mexico until his death.
Shum. El dibuixant de les mans trencades is an exciting incursion into our recent history, a story about the fight for freedom, about the power of humor to transform society and, above all, proof of the firm desire to survive and draw. Draw even with broken hands.
