Killing snow and an invisible enemy: The Eternaut's eternal struggle for survival

It's nighttime. A mysterious deadly snowfall over Buenos Aires wipes out everyone on the streets. El Eternauta is the shocking story of a group of people fighting to survive the toxic snowfall. A dire situation that will confront the characters and pose important ethical challenges. This is one of the key elements of the story: its ability to go beyond conventional science fiction. Something that was quite novel in 1957, when the first issues of this comic were published in the Argentine magazine Hora Cero . With a script by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and drawings by Francisco Solano López, El Eternauta became a cult comic that is now expanding its audience thanks to the Netflix miniseries starring Ricardo Darín .

The legend of El Eternauta doesn't end with that initial comic. Twelve years later, in 1969, Gente magazine presented another version, with a new script by Oesterheld himself and, in this case, drawings by Alberto Breccia. The two had worked together on Sherlock Time and Ernie Pike (the latter initially with drawings by Hugo Pratt ). In this second installment, Oesterheld doesn't extend the original story but rather retells it and adds a more political tone, emphasizing the value of collective struggle in a post-apocalyptic context. And it is this second version that now reaches bookstores under the title El Eternauta 1969 (Reservoir Books).

This is the first time it has been published in a restored version in Spanish, finally doing justice to the beauty of the drawings by Alberto Breccia, an undisputed giant of comics understood as the ninth art. It was a work misunderstood at the time due to the originality of the story and the innovative way of telling it, which motivated the magazine's editors to force its closure. Breccia himself would acknowledge, in 1992, that "the plot did not fit the editorial line" of the magazine and that "the art was very different from what was being done at the time." However, time has been on the side of El Eternauta 1969 .

Indeed, the work of Breccia and Oesterheld is in line with the author's comics that took off in France around the same time, beginning with the May 1968 movements. And in that type of comic, in works like these, lies the seed of the comic we find in bookstores today under the heading of graphic novels. What was so pioneering in 1969 that it baffled Argentine readers is now possible to understand and appreciate.

Alberto Breccia opted for formal experimentation. In El Eternauta (1969) , drawing became a terrain of exploration and graphic experimentation, combining moments of realist foundation with others in which the cartoon tended toward abstraction (a lesson we'll also see in the aforementioned Hugo Pratt). Breccia emphasized the contrast between light and dark areas in the cartoons, giving them depth and texture through the use of different techniques and materials: collages, diluted inks, scratches... This combination created a special atmosphere, a space between reality and dream that was very appropriate for this comic strip. A dense and rich visual universe that would later be very useful to Breccia for his literary adaptations of works by Borges, Sábato, Onetti, and Rulfo.

Breccia strengthens the contrast of light and shadow in the vignettes, giving them depth and texture.

Alberto Breccia began drawing comics so he wouldn't have to work as a factory worker. He wasn't even a regular comic book reader. And that's probably why he was able to work with such freedom, like a true artist. Oesterheld, for his part, paid with his life for his commitment to social and political criticism. The Argentine authorities didn't forgive him for the critical messages he conveyed in his comics, and he sadly became one of the "disappeared" (that is, murdered) during Videla's dictatorship in 1977.

Read also Original version The first Eternaut

Anyone who also wants to read the first version of El Eternauta , the one published by Oesterheld and Solano López between 1957 and 1959, is in luck because they have a recent edition from Planeta Cómic, titled simply El Eternauta , which compiles the original strips in a 370-page volume in a restored edition.