If you like arty comics, you cannot miss “The Eternaut” streaming on Netflix. The story is good, old-fashioned science fiction. Four friends are playing “truco”, a popular card game, in Buenos Aires when it starts to snow. It is summer. They look out of the window and they realise that as soon as people are in contact with the snow, they die. It is not snow, it is the first signal of an alien invasion!
The story follows their attempts to survive the invaders, including fighting giant insects and zombies controlled by the alien minds.
The original cartoon is legendary also because of some of the artists that drew it, originally Francisco Solano Lopez and then Alberto Breccia, an ink master able to create incredible atmospheres with his brushes.
The story of the author Héctor Germán Oesterheld
The Eternaut is also famous for a dark twist in the life of its author, Héctor Germán Oesterheld, an Argentinian journalist and writer. In 1968, he wrote a famous biography of Che Guevara that was immediately banned. His comics had always had political overtones, and in the mid-seventies, Oesterheld and his daughters joined the Montoneros movement to oppose the latest military dictatorship.
In 1977, Oesterheld was arrested and disappeared. His four daughters, two of them pregnant at the time, and sons-in-law met the same fate. They never returned, and their bodies were never found.
Only Oesterheld’s wife survived the onslaught, together with two grandchildren who were eventually handed back to her. She has been fighting to discover what happened to her husband and daughters and, potentially, other grandchildren.
The story of Elsa Sánchez, wife of Héctor Germán Oesterheld
Elsa Sánchez became one of the spokeswomen for the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which advocates for the return of children of the “disappeared” to their birth families.
When the Italian journalist Alberto Ongaro enquired about Oesterheld’s disappearance in 1979, he received the reply: “We did away with him because he wrote the most beautiful story of Ché Guevara ever done”.
Sometimes reality exceeds science fiction…
