"What does a few lives matter?": Notes on two comic-book invasions of Héctor Oesterheld (1974-1977)

Abstract

Héctor Germán Oesterheld occupies a central place in the Argentine comic tradition. Outstanding scriptwriter and editor, Oesterheld knew how to elaborate in his works an original adventure model in which there is no shortage of readings, references and allusions to the reality of his time. In addition to his literary quality, he was an intellectual committed with the problems and social and political needs of the country where he lived.In an Argentina convulsed by socio-political conflicts, the co-author of the mythical El Eternauta generated a new poetics for comics. During the 1970s, in the heat of his militancy in the left-wing of the Peronist movement, Oesterheld turned comics into a pedagogical and political action tool (Fernández, 2010).Our corpus of study and reflection are two science fiction titles of extraterrestrial invasion, guided by the author in the last stage of his life: La Guerra de los Antartes, with drawings by Gustavo Trigo, was serialized, with an unfinished ending, in the mid of the year 1974 in the newspaper Noticias, close to the guerrilla organization Montoneros; and El Eternauta II, drawn by Francisco Solano López - the same co-author of the original title - was published between 1976 and 1978 in Skorpio, a comic anthology magazine for the now-extinct Record Editions.We are interested in looking at both comics as representations of different moments and junctures from the trajectory of the author and Montoneros, the organization where he was an active member.Oesterheld, who spent his last years underground, was kidnapped and disappeared in April 1977, at the height of the last Argentine military dictatorship. At that time, the second part of El Eternauta was still published.Our goal is to detect discursive strategies through which Oesterheld, through fiction, projected and spread an ideal of utopian society close to the world view of the Peronist left of the time. We focus on the shifts that occur from one to another work in relation to models of order and social and political change, the construction of the subjectivity of the protagonists and the identity of the popular subject present in the stories. The arguments of both cartoons of invasion are read in light of the public speeches made by the Peronist political-military organization Montoneros, in which representations of order and social and political change can be recognized. We conjecture that the aforementioned plot shifts between the two series -in terms of social and political models- are relevant, taking into account that each work is inscribed within a particular moment in Argentine history and a particular moment in Montoneros´ political trajectory, situations that could have been interpreted and represented in the author´s scripts. La guerra de los Antartes and El Eternauta II cannot be fully understood except in relation to the actions and the discursive productions of the aforementioned Peronist armed organization.The perspective with which we will investigate the corpus is based in the categories of socioemotic discourse analysis (Verón, 1993) and the sociological theory that Pierre Bourdieu proposes in The Rules of Art (1995), noting, also, that we referenced ourselves in previous investigations on the work of Oesterheld (von Sprecher, 2007a, 2007b, 2010; Berone, 2014; Turnes, 2014, Fernández, 2010).