Much more than 'The Eternaut': A tour of Oesterheld's revealing legacy

The collective hero , Buenos Aires as the setting for an alien invasion , the extraordinary adventure starring ordinary people . The traits that defined El Eternauta 's proposal were not an exception but a recurring theme in Héctor Germán Oesterheld 's work as a comic book scriptwriter , from his beginnings in the profession until his disappearance , when he was kidnapped by a task force.

“The real adventure is resisting the invasion,” noted Pablo De Santis in the prologue to La guerra de los Antartes (1998), a collection of comics that Oesterheld and Gustavo Trigo developed between 1973 and 1974 for the newspaper Noticias . The action redefines the characters and involves them in a situation where personal experiences and knowledge are valued.

Oesterheld (Buenos Aires, 1919 – disappeared in 1977) introduced the theme for the first time in Uma-Uma , which also marked the beginning of his collaboration with the cartoonist Francisco Solano López (1928-2011). The comic strip was published in 1955 in the magazine Rayo Rojo and its plot anticipated two themes of the poetics of invasion : centuries ago there was contact between earthlings and extraterrestrials, which was the origin of a developed civilization on another planet, and the aliens secretly monitor what happens on Earth to prevent possible dangers or disputes for hegemony in the universe.

If that comic is set in Polynesia and its protagonists are British and American, in Rolo, the Adopted Martian , the next one, the action takes place in Buenos Aires with characters that refer to popular culture and the working class . Rolo is a fifth-grade teacher and president of the board of directors of a neighborhood club; he is accompanied on the adventure by, among others, a lathe operator, a printer, and a meatpacking factory worker. The group faces an invasion from the planet Parga, and once the threat is averted, they dedicate themselves to the liberation of Mars.

Also drawn by Solano López, the series was published in Hora Cero magazine between 1957 and 1958. In the initial plot, Rolo faces a dilemma: aliens offer him the position of ruler of Earth in exchange for choosing a contingent of children to be educated in Parga. The dilemma between collaboration and confrontation with the invaders is another characteristic of Oesterheld's stories.

"The characters reveal themselves in the action and become heroes in the face of successive circumstances. What distinguishes the protagonists is not their exceptionality but the fact that they are emphatically ordinary, Argentine, from Buenos Aires, even excessively typical," observes Juan Sasturain in his book The Adventurer: A Reading of Oesterheld.

On September 4, 1957, the first installment of El Eternauta was published in Hora Cero . Oesterheld later recounted in an interview with the weekly Siete Días that the comic strip came from his contributions to Más Allá , the first Argentine magazine dedicated to science fiction and scientific dissemination : “Ever since then, I'd been thinking about a short story that began with some friends playing truco while the city around them was dying from a deadly snowfall. The idea was to write a story with a quick ending.” But the saga illustrated by Solano López concluded on September 9, 1959, and ran to a total of 369 pages, each with 12 panels.

In El Eternauta, the Cascarudos, giant beetles; the Gurbos, extraterrestrial beasts; and the Manos, from a peaceful and cultured nation, appear. But the beings leading the invasion, the They, are unseen, and their lack of representation serves as a factor of suspense . In the second version of El Eternauta (1976-1977), an It is depicted within a kind of fog, and the detail mars a plot less successful than the previous one.

Among the supporting actors in El Eternauta, the turner Franco brings to mind a prototype prefigured in Rolo and beloved by Oesterheld: that of the young man linked to the world of work and popular culture who becomes the protagonist of the adventure . In Rul de la Luna (1958-1959, Frontera magazine, drawings by Solano López) two friends from Buenos Aires help an extraterrestrial return to his home on the Moon and confront some aliens called leminos; in Los marcianeros (1962-1963, Super Misterix , illustrated successively by Solano López, Julio Schiaffino and Di Benedetto) a student named Mario Larco leads the resistance against beings who intend to destroy the Earth.

The Martians are a secret elite group operating from a base in Antarctica and conducting expeditions to Mars in flying saucers. The group's composition is heterogeneous (a Sorbonne professor, a New York gangster, a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry) but ultimately evolves into Oesterheld's signature group: a lathe operator, a farmhand, and a student. In the finale, the protagonists detonate an "H-bomb" and sacrifice themselves to save Earth; the sacrifice necessary to save the species becomes another persistent theme, with a political overtone that becomes noticeable in the 1970s.

Oesterheld introduced the extraterrestrial theme even in a western , since one of his characters in the genre, Leonero Brent, confronts Martians. His discoveries in terms of plot also foreshadow milestones in science fiction cinema : "Three Eyes", an episode of the comic Sherlock Time (1959), presents an extraterrestrial creature hidden in a lost ship in Antarctica, in what was seen as a anticipation of The Thing from Another World , the film by John Carpenter; the agony of a Hand, where the flight of a goldfinch depicts the moment of its death, recalls a famous scene from Blade Runner with the "replicant" played by Rutger Hauer.

He also created aliens for children . In Marvo Luna , published in the magazine Billiken (1971-1973, illustrated by Solano López, José Muñoz and Vitacca-Adán), the facade of a toy store conceals a science erudite and his collaborators, among them a son of "saturnians." In the figurine collection Saucers Flying Attack!! (illustrated by Alberto Breccia, 1971) he retold the story of the alien invasion centered on Buenos Aires and the constitution of a group hero in charge of the resistance; it consisted of one hundred rectangular cardboard boxes that recounted an invasion coming initially from Pluto and later from Saturn. The figurines were distributed in envelopes with others of soccer players and teams.

Previously, between May 1970 and February 1971, Oesterheld and the cartoonist Napoleón (Antonio Mongiello Ricci) developed a first version of La guerra de los Antartes in the magazine 2001 . The series was published again in Noticias with illustrations by Gustavo Trigo , between February 22 and August 3, 1974. That day the newspaper was closed by a decree of the National Executive Power, so the comic strip remained unfinished.

The War of the Antartes begins on March 13, 2001, when an alien incursion is detected in Argentine Antarctica. Oesterheld recycles his resources : the invaders attack with a fulminating disease, like the snowfall before; the initial triumph of the aliens is followed by the organization of the resistance and an understanding of the event from a historical and political perspective, already anticipated in the remake of El Eternauta (1969), made with Alberto Breccia for the magazine Gente . However, the comic is marred by inconsistencies in the script, loose ends, and resolutions that reveal the haste and circumstances in which Oesterheld lived, dedicated to political activism and in transition to clandestinity.

The Argentina imagined by Oesterheld and Trigo has experienced another October 17th, and socialism is in the process of being built. “The Antartes arrived just as we were finally creating the new world,” reflects “Coya” Torres, the protagonist. In The Eternaut, the strangeness of the invader arises from his lack of humanity; in The War of the Antartes, the ominous aspect is that the aliens, in alliance with Western powers, intend to restore capitalism in Third World countries.

Oesterheld “dictated the strips to me from a pay phone, and I only wrote down the text and dialogue. The description of the panels was of little importance,” Gustavo Trigo recalled in the comic's reissue. However, since the late 1950s, when he wrote most of the stories published in the five magazines published by the Frontera publishing house, Oesterheld used to record his texts rather than write them down.

Miguel Rep recounted the persistence of the method in an evocation for the Radar supplement: “By the summer of 1977, Oesterheld began coming sporadically to work at the publishing house (Récord). Afterwards, he began coming almost every day. (…) His ceremony was curious: he would write his scripts quickly like a stenographer, with those strange characters, then read them aloud into a tape recorder, and a secretary would transcribe and type them . Once she had a page or two, the Old Man would read them and tweak them.”

One day, Rep recalled, "he stopped coming." Oesterheld was kidnapped by military forces and remains missing; while he was in a clandestine center, the second part of El Eternauta and other comics he wrote for Ediciones Record continued to be published. His wife, Elsa Sánchez, recalled the conversation she had with an officer while testifying at the Trial of the Juntas: "I asked him what crime my husband had committed, and he replied that he was a very dangerous ideologue. I was surprised because he was a person absolutely incapable of an act of violence."