Juan said it was a natural process to start drawing and re-creating everything that was captured in his mind’s eye.

While he was studying in Rio Cuarto, Argentina, he met Victor Hugo Arias, a professional cartoonist who was working at that time at Misterix magazine as wll as for the English Editorial Fleetway. Juan spent every afternoon at the house of this cartoonist, who became a teacher for him. He improved his techniques and learnt methods to improve his strokes.

His first opportunity as a cartoonist arose at 16 years of age, when Arias’s friend Hector Alfonso, cartoonist as well as a publisher, suggested to Juan to publish one of his comics.
His first comic book called “El Último Disparo” was published in 1960 in the magazine “Asalto” where Hector Alfonso was working.

“The story was elementary, an excuse to draw Matilda tanks fighting in the desert”

He managed to publish about 8 more comics in that magazine, before Argentina fell into an economic and political crisis. During this critical time, comics ended up suffering a great deal and the publisher disappeared. Thus, Juan was left no choice but to return to his studies of Mechanical Technology.
All the magazines and the most important cartoonist including Arias, went to Europe.

In the early 60s, Juan’s father was transferred to a region in ​​Brazil which was under developed where Juan drew only for pleasure and for himself.

Giménez graduated around this time. He began working in advertising, which allowed him to be as possible to drawing, along with providing him financial independence. He worked in advertising for 15 years. During this period, he had discontinued drawing comic books.

At work, however, he did have the opportunity to make animation movies and live. Later as a cartoonist, he unconsciously drew upon everything he had learnt about cinema during his advertising. For example, he learnt to put images together in such a way that the sequences were correlated with each other.

In the mid 1970’s he returned to the world of comics with short stories for the magazine Skorpio (1974-1996), some of them collected on the album The Strange Trial of Roy Ely.

Although Juan recognised that it was hard for him to start all over again, he also felt fresh and motivated be surrounded by new trends and a whole new generation of cartoonists.

During this new phase, he was influenced by several new cartoonists such as Moebius.

“Moebius gave me a brain shock. That variety of techniques, daring with any subject, color, black and white. In addition to that fantastic inner world that he has.”