El Eternauta II. Nos. 1-17 [all published].

Oesterheld, Héctor Germán and Francisco Solano López (Illus.) El Eternauta II. Nos. 1-17 [all published]. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Record, 1977-1978. Complete first edition in 17 vols. as originally issued. 

El Eternauta is a landmark work of Latin American science fiction. Its story of oppression and resistance has achieved mythic status in Argentina and abroad, and its iconography continues to be used as a symbol of opposition. “Most people in the Argentine sf community, including the nation’s foremost critic of the genre, Pablo Capanna, cite El Eternauta as one of the greatest works, if not the greatest work, of sf produced in that country.” Capanna has defined Latin American sf as one in which the Latin American reader “sentirse interpreatado” [feels themselves represented]. El Eternauta is the quintessential example of this representation. 

Not unlike iconic US comics of the 1950s and 1960s, El Eternauta has generated many sequels and spinoffs (including a 2025 Netflix series). Despite a somewhat confusing number of anthologies, reprints, and edited editions, there were only three distinct Eternauta series authored by Héctor Germán Oesterheld: El Eternauta I [1957-1959], El Eternauta 1969 [a heavily edited version of El Eternauta I with new illus.], and the present sequel, El Eternauta II [1976-1978].

The original story [El Eternauta I] by Oesterheld ran in the weekly comics magazine Hora Cero Semanal from September 1957 to September 1959 and immediately redefined sf comics in Argentina with its literary quality, local setting, and the dark drama of the illustrations by Francisco Solano López. The choice to set the action of the comic in Buenos Aires was radical; critic Juan Sasturain has written about how the “natural home” of previous sf and fantasy comics was a northern, English-speaking environment. “Oesterheld [w]as a pioneer who ‘changed the address’ of Adventure, making Argentines and Argentine reality ‘adventurable’; Oesterheld accomplished this both on the surface levels of his narrative and at the deeper levels of the national imaginary, representing an Argentine or ‘third world’ perspective [‘planteo tercerista’] in his story. [This] ‘third world perspective’ is particularly apparent in his exploration of issues of power dynamics both among members of Argentine society and among nations of the world.” 

El Eternauta disrupted these traditional dynamics by refusing a simplistic opposition of good and evil. The story is an ongoing catastrophe; the struggle is global (not just north vs south or USA vs USSR etc); and the enemies are revealed to be victims: alien races enslaved by the unseen intergalactic rulers “Los Ellos”. Equally, Oesterheld was uninterested in a singular hero. He wrote: “The true hero of El Eternauta is a collective hero, a human group. It thus reflects, although without prior design, my deep feeling: the only valid hero is the “group” hero, never the individual hero, the hero alone.” 

The history of El Eternauta’s reception and canonization cannot be separated from the haunting story of Oesterheld’s life and the state sponsored terrorism of Argentina’s Dirty War (1976-1983). Oesterheld radicalized in the 1960s and he republished El Eternauta I in 1969 with a new illustrator (Breccia) and textual edits that made its liberation allegory more explicitly socialist [this version now known as El Eternauta 1969]. In the 1970s, he and his four daughters joined the far-left guerilla organization Montoneros whose armed resistance against Argentina’s military-civilian dictatorship was being brutally repressed. It was in this context that Oesterheld and Solano López began work on the long-awaited continuation of the story, the present work on offer: El Eternauta: Segunda Parte (El Eternauta II). 

Solano López wrote that with each new version of El Eternauta Oesterheld identified more and more with his own story. In El Eternauta II, the time-traveling protagonist Juan Salvo has become a militant against an oppressive regime and the writer accompanying him on his adventure is openly called Germán; the character’s daughter “Maria” is based on Oesterheld’s daughter Beatriz, a Montoneros guerilla. 

The first chapter of El Eternauta II was published in the serial Skorpio in December 1976, nine months after the coup d’etat that established Argentina’s final military junta. Oesterheld’s family was already the victim of Argentinian death squads - in the summer of 1976 two of his daughters were disappeared: Beatriz (19) and Diana (23 and pregnant); his third, Marina (20 and pregnant), was taken in November. The women and their children were never found. Oesterheld himself was in hiding and submitting new chapters of Eternauta II through clandestine channels, the episodes churn with heightened terror and anxiety; it was dangerous to publish and only three of the 17 Skorpio issues advertised Eternauta II episodes on the cover (Libro de Oro 2; Nos. 28 and 33). 

On April 27, 1977, Oesterheld was kidnapped by military agents. From the testimony of other prisoners it is known that he was held and tortured in some of Argentina’s most notorious prisons. His fourth daughter, Estela (25), was murdered by the junta in December 1977. It is believed Oesterheld himself died sometime in 1978 but his body was never recovered. Only Oesterheld’s wife and two of his grandsons survived. Skorpio continued to publish its backlog of Eternauta II installments monthly until April 1978.  

The illustrator Solano López also faced repercussions. His son was abducted; after the artist successfully arranged for his release the family fled to Madrid. Some of the final artwork for Eternauta II was completed from this exile. In some interviews, Solano López cast doubts on the authorship of the last few episodes of Eternauta II. Could they really have been delivered from hiding? Were they consistent with the subtlety of Oesterheld’s other work? Solano López speculated but never came to a definitive conclusion. 

The real danger of publishing and possessing Oesterheld’s work, coupled with the low quality of the era’s paper stock, resulted in many destroyed, damaged, or discarded copies. Issues from 1976 and 1977 rarely appear on the market. Eternauta II did not appear in the Italian version of Skorpio until years later. Two recorded OCLC holdings in North America: a single issue at MSU and a complete set at Duke. 

See: Rachel Haywood Ferreira, "Más Allá, El Eternauta, and the Dawn of the Golden Age of Latin American Science Fiction (1953-59)," Extrapolation 51.2 (2010): pp 281-303.

The complete first edition is composed of: 17 “episodios”, each 12 pp., published in 17 consecutive vols. of Skorpio. Beginning with Libro de Oro de Skorpio No. 2 (Dec. 1976), followed by Skorpio Nos. 27-36, Libro de Oro de Skorpio No. 3 (November 1977), and concluding with Skorpio Nos. 37-41 (Dec. 1977-April 1978). Each vol. near 26.5 cm, total page length of each monthly issue varies widely. Nine of the 17 issues in expected used condition: papers toned, wrappers rubbed with signs of use, minor chipping, bumped spines, etc. The other eight issues are more worn, five with separated wrappers, a few bent corners or small losses to covers, no. 33 missing spine, Libro de Oro 2 and no. 28 spine reinforced with tape. No. 32 with damage to the lower fore edge of first two leaves, not affecting story panels.