The Eternaut and Héctor Oesterheld

I wrote about the history of The Eternaut comic and Buenos Aires-born writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld back in 2016 at Hyperallergic. Long before it was adapted for a Netflix series that debuts on April 30th, The Eternaut was El Eternauta, a subversive black-and-white science fiction/action-adventure comic strip rife with depictions of technophobia, mind-control horrors, and a full-scale intergalactic enemy invasion. It ran serially in an anthology magazine in Argentina beginning in 1957, and 20 years later, the references to political oppression and other unfathomable ghastliness at the core of the comic became reality: Oesterheld, The Eternaut’s co-creator, was nearing his 59th birthday when he was kidnapped by heavily militarized Argentine death squads. He was never seen again.

“Argentina had a rich comics tradition going back to the 1920s and had produced many skilled and polished artists in both the humor and adventure modes,” write Dan Mazur and Alexander Danner in Comics: A Global History, 1968 to the Present. “This remarkable concentration of artistic talent was fruitful and energizing, and Argentina experienced a comics boom until the late 1950s, when the economy began to collapse.”

Mazur and Danner discuss the common ground between the mid-century work of celebrated Argentine comics professionals like Oesterheld and Italian artists such as Guido Crepax, creator of the sexy and graphically audacious “Valentina” comics, and how their comics frequently shared real estate in the same magazines.

Hugo Pratt, a native of Rimini, Italy, who is best known for his Corto Maltese character, migrated to Buenos Aires for a time and penciled popular strips that Oesterheld scripted back then, such as Ticonderoga and Ernie Pike. These ran in comics anthology magazines published by Editorial Frontera, the house that Oesterheld established in 1956.

Comics magazines like those helmed by the Eternaut author were commonplace in countries outside of the United States. In America, newspapers were the medium before comics moved to the magazine format, appearing as anthologies, during the 1930s. (“Big Little Books,” published by the likes of Whitman and Dell, preceded comics magazines in the US and featured reprints of strips such as Flash Gordon and Dick Tracy—the road from The Yellow Kid to standalone American superhero comics was long, and Superman didn’t show up until 1938.)

In the mid-1960s, Italian readers experienced Crepax’s “Valentina” stories in a monthly magazine called Linus, while French readers found the strips in Charlie Mensuel, which launched in 1969. Both magazines also featured translations of American strips. Stateside, readers followed Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella in the underground literary magazine Evergreen Review. Hora Cero, one of the magazines published by Oesterheld, was home to the original Eternaut comic strip—El Eternauta—which was drawn by internationally acclaimed Argentine artist Francisco Solano López.

The first installment of The Eternaut sees a mysterious man named Juan Salvo, initially appearing as an apparition, visit a comics writer at his home office. Salvo takes on the form of a human being and talks of his exhaustion from time travel, as he’d been trying to track down his family and hopping from one dimension to the next.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Salvo tells the writer in the expository panels. “Before you turn me away, before you say no, let me tell you my story. When I’ve told you everything, you’ll understand, even the strange way I appeared. And I’m sure you’ll want to help me.”

Salvo assumes the role of narrator in The Eternaut, and through Oesterheld’s thrilling copy—and breathtaking illustrations from López—his tale of vast post-apocalyptic destruction and a war for survival against an alien invasion in his quiet Buenos Aires neighborhood becomes central to the work.

Even given López’s clean, realist style and the comic’s compelling and provocative subject matter, The Eternaut isn’t without the melodrama we associate with the pulp science fiction of the day, and comparisons between Oesterheld’s writing and vintage EC horror and sci-fi titles or The Twilight Zone are totally reasonable.

This kind of thing may discourage contemporary readers—which is sad and stupid, because postwar horror comics are objectively great—but as translator Erica Mena argues in a foreword to the 2015 Fantagraphics graphic novel edition of the book, which marks the first time this comic has appeared in English, The Eternaut is a truly literary work that “asks hard questions about the world, and wonders what we can do to change things.”

Beginning in the late 1970s, Argentina was governed by a ruthless right-wing military dictatorship. It sought to censor and squash voices of dissent, and tens of thousands of people were “disappeared” by the Argentine death squads of the era. Oesterheld supported a left-wing guerrilla group called the Montoneros in the 1970s, and at least two of his comics—overtly leftist in their content—ran in publications connected to the organization. 

Government officials found Oesterheld’s affiliation with the Montoneros and the political themes in his widely loved comic strips cause for punishment. Among the writer’s allegedly offensive published works were The Eternaut 1969, a more politicized sequel to his ‘50s strip, this time drawn by Argentine artist Alberto Breccia, and a graphic biography of revolutionary “Che” Guevara that Oesterheld worked on with Breccia and his son Enrique. The elder Breccia also partnered with Oesterheld on Mort Cinder, a strip that debuted in Mexican magazine Misterix in the summer of 1962 and ran for two years. The innovative Breccia used toothbrushes, razors, and more to produce textured finishes and harsh, bottomless blacks in his fastidious drawings for the comic.

When troops captured Oesterheld and all four of his adult daughters—two of whom were pregnant—none of them were ever seen alive again. In The Eternaut, it's as if the writer was telegraphing the horrors that would befall him at the hands of his own repellent government. 

“The contrast between the oppressive hopelessness of the situation and the near-miraculous survival and triumph of the protagonists is pointed and political,” writes Mena of The Eternaut. “That the worst brings out the best in humanity is perhaps trite, but it is an observation worth making over and over.”

Read more in my 2016 review of The Eternaut at Hyperallergic.

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The Eternaut TV series from Netflix and K&S Films has a new trailer, and it debuts on April 30th, 2025. Héctor Oesterheld’s grandson Martín M. Oesterheld is a creative consultant on the show. Illustrations by Francisco Solano López. Images © 2015 Fantagraphics. This post was updated and re-published on April 7, 2025.