Juan falls in with a group of soldiers planning a counter-offensive, and one of them is a writer, a pathetic specimen of a journalist named Mosca (Spanish for “fly”), who is always trying to document the momentous battles as they’re being fought. This, too, is probably a self-deprecating self-portrait. “How goes the history, Mosca, my friend?” Juan, now a lieutenant, asks his frantically scribbling squad-mate. “Too fast, Lieutenant,” Mosca answers. “So many things have happened, I haven’t had time to write them.”
In the nineteen-sixties, Argentina cycled through a succession of ineffectual and authoritarian regimes—a succession punctuated very occasionally by democratic rule, notably under Arturo Frondizi. As the country did so, Oesterheld’s work focussed more and more on the plight of the poor. In the late sixties, he and Alberto Breccia, along with Breccia’s son, Enrique, began work on the first in a proposed series of comic-book biographies of notable American leaders. One proposed subject was Che Guevara, the Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary who had become a public enemy of right-wing regimes across Latin America. It was a risky commission for Oesterheld to accept: Juan Carlos Onganía, who had seized the Presidency of Argentina in 1966, had pledged to send troops into Bolivia if Guevara’s movement overthrew that country’s right-wing government, according to a 1967 declassified C.I.A. memo.
Rote adventure stories were ubiquitous in Argentine comics, and Oesterheld was good at writing them. In Guevara, Oesterheld found a real person around whom all the trappings of the genre seemed to fall into place: a swashbuckling wartime hero who was gentle when he could afford to be and lethal when duty required. “Vida del Che” went on sale in January, 1969, a year and three months after Guevara’s execution, by a Bolivian soldier. In the book, Che shares Oesterheld’s preoccupation with the downtrodden. He trains guerrillas to fight colonial oppressors and teaches a doomed peasant to read. According to the book’s publication history, the publisher, Jorge Álvarez, offered to remove the names of the authors from the cover in anticipation of trouble. Instead, Oesterheld insisted that his name remain.
Álvarez’s fears were well founded. “Che” was denounced almost as soon as it was published. “It has been drawn in the darkest and crudest shades, typical of passé revolutionary positions,” an editorial published on January 10th of that year in La Nación read. According to Enrique Breccia, the S.I.E., Argentina’s Army intelligence service, raided Álvarez’s company, breaking the printing plates and destroying copies of the book. The original pages vanished; for years, Enrique has claimed to have heard that an image from the book’s final scene—in which Che orders his executioner to kill him—hung, framed, at the house of President Onganía’s Minister of the Interior.
By the beginning of the nineteen-seventies, Juan Perón had been officially absent from Argentina’s national politics for fifteen years. But, from his exile, which was mostly spent in Spain, he cultivated relationships with labor organizers and militant groups. Oesterheld’s four daughters were active in leftist politics, and eventually they all joined a leftist group called the Montoneros, which claimed responsibility for several bombings and assassinations and funded itself in part with ransoms extorted by kidnapping executives of multinational companies.
As Oesterheld’s daughters grew more involved with the Montoneros, his stories became increasingly militant. An attempted revival of “El Eternauta,” in the pages of Gente, a class-conscious gossip magazine, was hurriedly cancelled. Undaunted, Oesterheld began working on a leftist alien-invasion strip, “La Guerra de los Antartes,” in the magazine 2001. In his longest-running strip, “Ernie Pike,” he now abandoned the Second World War and wrote passionately about the pointless horrors of the American war in Vietnam. “This new stage of my journalistic career is entirely dedicated to the war that, today, in this same moment you’re reading me, reader, is tearing up the body, so full of life, of a boy like you,” he wrote, in 1971.
Perón emerged from exile, in 1973, buoyed by a fragile alliance between the left and right flanks of the movement that he had founded. The day that he was scheduled to land in Buenos Aires, right-wing Perónists—organized in part by José López Rega, an official who would go on to join Perón’s new Administration—opened fire on the leftist Perónists in the crowds assembled to welcome Perón back into the country. Some targeted the Montoneros with sawed-off shotguns from a dais, while the attackers’ allies flanked them from sniper positions in trees at the edge of the crowd. Hundreds were injured and at least a dozen people were killed. That same year, López Rega helped found the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (A.A.A.), a secret police force that travelled in green Ford Falcons to carry out kidnappings and killings.
Oesterheld began contributing to a leftist newspaper aligned with the Montoneros, Las Noticias. There, one of his colleagues recruited him to join the organization itself. It was a very dangerous thing to do. But Oesterheld was tiring of allegory: in his latest comic, a new version of “La Guerra de los Antartes,” there were no aliens, only state oppression. The strip lasted six months, until Perón’s third wife, Isabel, who had assumed the Presidency following her husband’s death, of a heart attack, had the newspaper shut down and its offices raided, in 1974, as part of a crackdown on Perónism’s left flank. By then, Oesterheld was at work on a new serial that abandoned metaphor altogether. For the Montoneros’ propaganda outlet, El Descamisado, he began a grand leftist history of Argentina called “450 Años de Guerra al Imperialismo”—“450 Years of Imperialist War.”
Agents of imperialist war were not far from Oesterheld. His family’s biographers, Fernanda Nicolini and Alicia Beltrami, write that, on January 22, 1974, an A.A.A. squad locked those working in the El Descamisado newsroom in the office of an editor who was on vacation and held mock executions while they interrogated the journalists; the staffers were only saved, ironically, by the federal police, who intervened when they were told that the office was under attack. Oesterheld’s artist Leopoldo Durañona said later he was grateful Oesterheld had taken too long writing his latest script. The inconvenience meant Durañona missed his own deadline, and thus hadn’t finished drawing the new chapter in their history of imperialist oppression in time to get to the office and be brutalized by the A.A.A.
In 1976, the Argentine armed forces mounted a successful coup d’état, deposing Isabel Perón. Under the direction of the military dictator Jorge Videla, and with the encouragement of the U.S. government, the police and the military formally assumed the role that A.A.A., now dissolved, had played. Official death squads began a campaign of kidnapping and murdering dissenters. Oesterheld registered the escalating terror and violence in “El Eternauta II,” a sequel to the original series that ran in the comics magazine Skorpio. Oesterheld’s new “Eternauta” was not merely political—it was personal. He wrote himself into the adventures as the main character, fighting Ellos alongside his narrator and hero, Juan Salvo. If “El Eternauta II” was more directly a chronicle of guerrilla life than its predecessor, it was more fantastical, too. In one episode, the characters travel to a landscape that looks like Hell itself, where they must strap on mechanical bat wings to escape their tormentors. It was as if its author had stepped out of the real world and onto the page.
On June 19, 1976, after having tea with Elsa, Oesterheld’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Beatriz, was kidnapped. On August 7th, her sister Diana, twenty-three years old and pregnant, disappeared. Oesterheld himself managed to avoid capture for eight more months. When he saw his friends, they said he changed his appearance. He grew a long beard. The last time that he saw his “Eternauta” collaborator Francisco Solano López, in early 1977, the pair were in a subway car in Buenos Aires, and Oesterheld was wearing sunglasses to avoid being recognized. Solano wanted to introduce Oesterheld to a friend on the train who worked for the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores—the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—and Oesterheld asked him not to.
On April 27, 1977, Oesterheld was arrested. His two remaining daughters also fell victim to the junta: Marina, who was thought to be pregnant, vanished. Estela died during a failed kidnapping attempt. In prison, Oesterheld did the only thing that he really knew how to do. “At the moment, ‘El Viejo’ [‘The Old Man’] is with us: he’s the author of ‘El Eternauta’ and ‘Sergeant [Kirk],’ ” Ana María Caruso de Carri, a fellow detainee, wrote, in a letter to her daughters. “Do you remember them? The poor old fellow spends his days writing comic strips, which until now no one has any intention of publishing.” That same year, another inmate remembers giving Oesterheld an orange on his fifty-eighth birthday. His final “El Eternauta II” strip was published in Skorpio in April, 1978.
When Oesterheld disappeared, he became the kind of global symbol he had helped make of Che Guevara and Evita Perón. In Belgium, Amnesty International published a comics anthology entitled “Pétition—À la Recherche d’Oesterheld et de Tant d’Autres!” (“Petition—In Search of Oesterheld and So Many Others!”) The drawing on the cover, by the Belgian spy-comics star William Vance, showed Oesterheld being taken away at gunpoint. At the 1980 Salone Internazionale dei Comics, a prestigious festival in Lucca, Italy, Oesterheld was given the festival’s highest award, the Yellow Kid, named for Richard Outcault’s pioneering newspaper comic strip. No one could say for sure whether the award was posthumous.
“El Eternauta” can be spotted on face coverings in photos of Argentines shielding themselves and their neighbors from COVID-19. The image of a face staring out from the diving-mask visor of a makeshift spacesuit, from the original run of “El Eternauta,” remains a logo for leftist resistance in Argentina: an affectionately vandalized version of the character could be seen in placards and stencils depicting Néstor Kirchner, the center-left President of Argentina from 2003 to 2007, as “El Nestornauta.”
The fictional journalist Ernie Pike, too, survived the junta’s brutality. In a 1984-85 serial by the comic-book writer Ricardo Barreiro, the character covers Argentina’s war against the British occupation of the Falkland Islands, which Argentines call Las Malvinas. “I have a friend in Buenos Aires who I have not been able to locate,” Ernie says to one of his local sources. “A certain Héctor Oesterheld. Do you know him?”
“Shh,” the source replies. “It is better not to pronounce some names.” ♦