Few screenwriters have had the career of the Argentine Héctor Germán Oesterheld (Buenos Aires, 1919-1978), a true legend of international comics, revered in Argentina and read around the world. Reservoir Books just 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 known, above all, for The Eternaut (1957-1959), a series he created together with the cartoonist Francisco Solano López, whose protagonist became an icon of popular culture, but with an evident political dimension, not only because the work speaks of freedom and anti-imperialism—through the metaphor of an extraterrestrial invasion—in the midst of a civil-military dictatorship, after the coup that ended the Government of Juan Domingo Perón in 1955, but also because the figure of the protagonist of The Eternaut It has been used in electoral campaigns of the Peronist left, to the point of creating the figure of the “Nestornauta”, in reference to Néstor Kirchner.
Oesterheld’s early work, during the 1950s, is part of a progressive humanism that is not very concrete, which defends human rights and life as an absolute value. But it will be from the second half of the 1960s when this commitment becomes more clearly politicized, which will lead him to take more defined ideological positions, which will be reflected in his works.
This political consciousness was already manifested in the Onganía dictatorship, during the so-called “Argentine Revolution” (1966-1973), but it reached its peak during the National Reorganization Process (1976-1983) of Videla and others. At that time, Oesterheld followed the path of his four daughters and became committed to the clandestine and radical organization of Montoneros. In 1976, he went into hiding, from which he finished the script for the second part of The Eternautin which the original pacifism was replaced by the justification of revolutionary violence. In 1977, as had happened to his daughters, Oesterheld was kidnapped, “disappeared,” and murdered sometime in early 1978.
The myth of Che Guevara
Life of Che It is the first work included in the recent reissue of Reservoir Books. Originally published in Argentina in early 1968, just a few months after the death of Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Bolivia, its appearance challenged the civil-military dictatorship, which, in fact, banned the work and withdrew the edition, which It would not be recovered until years later. For this comic, Oesterheld teamed up with Alberto Breccia (Montevideo, 1919-Buenos Aires, 1993), undoubtedly the most admired Argentine comic artist, known for his artistic approach to the medium and his experimental restlessness. This tandem would 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 strokes and occasional forays into the collage. Oesterheld achieves great coherence with his texts, written in an atypical way, sometimes omitting words, as if they were telegrams, and other times giving the information in strokes. The evident artistic intentions of the couple—plus that of Enrique Breccia (Buenos Aires, 1945), who helped with the last pages—are subordinated to the propaganda vocation of the work, which exalts the figure of Che, omits any controversial 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 would fall fighting alongside the guerrillas.
Despite being a work carried out from an uncritical militancy, Oesterheld’s dynamic texts and Breccia’s strong illustrations make for an entertaining read, which maintains the interest of readers 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 Life of CheOesterheld and Breccia are considering creating 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 of the country prevented its publication, since Eva Perón, “Evita”, with a strong symbolic charge, was banned in the dictatorial context, to the point that her embalmed corpse was missing. unknown since 1955, after his premature death in 1952, a victim of cancer. The work ended up being published during the seventies, using Breccia’s drawings and replacing Oesterheld’s texts with more neutral ones; We will have to wait until 2002 for an edition to be published that recovers the original texts, preserved in the Breccia house: this is the version included in the recent book by Reservoir Books.
Evita, life and work of Eva Perón It has a much more documentary character than the previous collaboration of the artistic couple, with longer texts and a purely illustrative nature of the drawings, with hardly any narrative sequences or dialogue balloons. Consequently, it is a much more dry reading, a biography that, at times, takes on hagiographic overtones in its gloss on the virtues and achievements of a woman who practically achieved the status of saint among the Argentine popular classes.
Thus, we cover her humble origins, her brief career as an actress 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. In addition, her international diplomatic work is covered, which led her to visit Spain under the dictatorship of Franco, who entertained her by granting her the Order of Isabella the Catholic.
Oesterheld, from his activism in Peronism and his political commitment, also focuses on the hatred that Evita aroused in the wealthy classes, and on the love that the most humble classes professed for the charismatic “first lady”, whose last months, hit by the illness, also picks up this comic, as happens with the desecration of his embalmed corpse.
Che/Evita Thus, it includes two works that were born of their time and were the result of the political context that existed in Argentina, in which Oesterheld did not want to be neutral. A great opportunity to discover a facet of this not entirely known screenwriter.
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