Few screenwriters have had the career of Argentinian Héctor Germán Oesterheld (Buenos Aires, 1919-1978), a true legend of international comics, revered in Argentina and read throughout the world. Reservoir Books has just been published Che/Evitaa volume that recovers two of his works, long out of print in Spain, and which are part of his most politicized and militant period.
Oesterheld is best known for The Eternaut (1957-1959), a series he created with the designer Francisco Solano López, whose protagonist has become an icon of popular culture, but with an obvious political dimension, not only because the work speaks of freedom and of anti-imperialism, through the metaphor of an extraterrestrial invasion – in the middle of a civil-military dictatorship, after the coup d’état which put an end to the government of Juan Domingo Perón in 1955, but also because the figure of the protagonist of The Eternaut It was used in the electoral campaigns of the Peronist left, to the point of creating the figure of “Nestornauta”, in reference to Néstor Kirchner.
Oesterheld’s first works, in the 1950s, are part of a progressive humanism that is not very concrete, which defends human rights and life as an absolute value. But it was from the second half of the 1960s that this commitment became more clearly politicized, which led him to take more defined ideological positions, which were reflected in his works.
This political consciousness had already manifested itself under the dictatorship of Onganía, during the so-called “Argentine Revolution” (1966-1973), but it reached its peak during the process of national reorganization (1976-1983) of Videla and others. At this time, Oesterheld followed the path of his four daughters and became involved in the clandestine and radical organization of the Montoneros. In 1976, he went into hiding and finished the script for the second part of The Eternautin which original pacifism was replaced by the justification of revolutionary violence. In 1977, like his daughters, Oesterheld was kidnapped, “disappeared” and murdered in early 1978.
The myth of Che Guevara
The life of Che This is the first work included in the recent reissue from Reservoir Books. Originally published in Argentina in early 1968, just months after the death of Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Bolivia, its publication defied the civil-military dictatorship, which effectively banned the work and withdrew the edition, which was not the case. be recovered only years later. For this comic, Oesterheld teamed up with Alberto Breccia (Montevideo, 1919-Buenos Aires, 1993), arguably the most admired Argentine comics artist, known for his artistic approach to the medium and his experimental concern. This tandem will also publish, in 1969, a new version of The Eternaut.
In this biography of Che, which covers his entire life, from his birth to his assassination, Breccia plays with the contrasts of black and white, with expressionist features and occasional forays into collage. Oesterheld achieves great coherence with his texts, written in an atypical manner, sometimes omitting words, as if they were telegrams, and other times giving the information in strokes. The obvious artistic intentions of the couple – to which is added that of Enrique Breccia (Buenos Aires, 1945), who collaborated on the last pages – are subordinated to the propagandist vocation of the work, which exalts the figure of Che, omitting everything polemical aspect and focuses on his revolutionary idealism and his vocation to help others. The sequences illustrating the Cuban revolution glorify his contributions on the ground, but also praise Che’s decision to leave Cuba and continue the armed revolution in the Congo and finally in Bolivia, where he will fall alongside the guerrillas.
Although it is a work produced with uncritical activism, Oesterheld’s dynamic texts and Breccia’s strong illustrations make it an entertaining read, which maintains readers’ interest and offers a good example of the talent of the two authors, of undeniable historical relevance.
The myth of Evita
Shortly after the publication of The life of CheOesterheld and Breccia plan to create another biography within the same series dedicated to the key figure of Eva Perón, wife of President Juan Alberto Perón and myth of the Peronist left. The work was completed in 1970, but the political situation in the country prevented its publication, because Eva Perón, “Evita”, with a strong symbolic charge, was banned in the dictatorial context, to the point that her embalmed corpse was missing. since 1955, after his premature death in 1952 from cancer. The work was eventually published in the 1970s, using Breccia’s drawings and replacing Oesterheld’s texts with more neutral texts; It was not until 2002 that an edition was published which recovered the original texts, kept in the Breccia house: this is the version included in the recent book from Reservoir Books.
Evita, life and work of Eva Perón It has a much more documentary character than the artistic couple’s previous collaboration, with longer texts and a purely illustrative nature of the drawings, without practically any narrative sequence or dialogue balloon. It is therefore a much drier read, a biography that sometimes takes on hagiographic overtones in its gloss on the virtues and achievements of a woman who practically achieved saint-like status among Argentina’s working classes.
Thus, we approach her humble origins, her brief acting career and her entry into politics, through her marriage to Perón, but above all we focus on her social work: her fight against child poverty, for equality between women and men. and in favor of free public education and health. Additionally, her international diplomatic work is covered, which led her to visit Spain during the dictatorship of Franco, who entertained her by granting her the Order of Isabel the Catholic.
Oesterheld, through his Peronist activism and his political commitment, also focuses on the hatred that Evita aroused in the wealthy classes, and on the love that the humblest classes professed for the charismatic “first lady”, whose last months, struck by illness, also takes up this comedy, as happens with the desecration of his embalmed corpse.
Che/Evita Thus, it includes two works born from their time and resulting from the political context that existed in Argentina, in which Oesterheld did not want to be neutral. A great opportunity to discover a side of this little-known screenwriter.
