The Eternaut comic and Héctor Oesterheld at Hyperallergic

January 31, 2016—At Hyperallergic, I wrote about the history of The Eternaut comic and Buenos Aires-born comics writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld. The Eternaut—a black-and-white science-fiction/adventure comic rife with technophobia and mind-control horrors—initially ran serially in an Argentine anthology magazine beginning in 1957. Twenty years later, Oesterheld, the strip’s co-creator, was nearing his 59th birthday when he was kidnapped by heavily militarized Argentine death squads. He was never seen again.

Government officials found the political themes in Oesterheld’s very popular comics cause for punishment. Among the offenders was the graphic biography of revolutionary “Che” Guevara that Oesterheld had penned with Argentine father-and-son artists Alberto and Enrique Breccia.

In The Eternaut, which was drawn by Francisco Solano López and published originally as El Eternauta, it's as if Oesterheld was telegraphing the horrors that would befall him at the hands of his own repellent government—read more in my review of The Eternaut at Hyperallergic.

This collected edition of The Eternaut was published by Fantagraphics in 2015. (See also my post on Mort Cinder, which was written by Oesterheld and illustrated by Alberto Breccia.)