Everything starts with a blackout, as here a few days ago. Only here the thing stayed in Pepe Gotera and Otilio the brown lord playing with renewables and demagogy, and in the case of The Eternaluta that It is only the beginning of a situation in which shortly after a snowfall falls in the middle of summer and it turns out that snow is toxic and kills you if your skin touches you. And horrors do not end there, because this are prolegomena of an alien invasion.
The Eternaluta Not only is the masterpiece of the Argentine comic, but one of the international milestones of the science fiction comic. Since it was first published by deliveries in the magazine Zero hour From the Border Editorial, between 1957 and 1959, he has not stopped accumulating reissues and new enthusiastic readers. There had been decades of an adaptation to the cinema that never arrived. Now Netflix has made it a television series directed by Bruno Stagnaro. And who plays its protagonist, Juan Salvo? Well Ricardo Darín, of course. Who was not going to put a normal and current Argentine forced to face, along with his friends and his family, to a limit situation?
The original comic was published at the end of the fifties, which means that the context was the cold war and literature, cinema and comics were filled with chungos aliens. Science fiction was in its peak. In the United States, alien invasions were metaphor for the fear of infiltration or attack by the Soviet, and among the avalancing B’s Bowls of the time of the time, it stands out The invasion of bodies thieves of Don Siegel, for its use of the abduction of wills. It is very likely that The screenwriter of The EternalutaHéctor Germán OesterheldI would have seen it, because in your comic the manipulation of wills also appears. Only that the situation in Argentina was very different from that of the United States, and Oesterheld was not thinking of Soviet aggressions but in military dictatorships. He himself, progressively radicalized until linked to the Montoneros, would end up being a victim of one of them. He was one of the disappeared during the time of the Military Board of Videla.
Before this tragic end, he was the best scriptwriter of the classic Argentine comic. The fifties were a time of splendor for the comic industry of that country. Hugo Pratt himself spent that decade in Buenos Aireswhere he drew his great first -time works prior to Corto Maltés: Sargento kirk, ticonderoga y enrie pike. Who was the screenwriter of all of them? Well Héctor Germán Oesterheld.
In the case of The EternalutaHe told Francisco Solano López, an effective illustrator but much less inventive, so the power of this work is in his script more than in his graphic part. One of the many interesting aspects of the plot is that the apocalyptic scenario is not New York or Los Angeles, as usual, but a recognizable Buenos Airesin which even the River stadium has a very relevant role.
-Fidelity to the original spirit
The Netflix series is very faithful to the spirit of the comic and its most iconic elements Like the masks -washaws, welder helmets … – that the characters have to be placed so that the snow does not touch their skin, or the appearance of the bugs that begin to appear. However, it updates the time of the action, moving it to the present, which may seem an anatema, but it is a good idea, which should not scandalize any admirer of the original comic.
It also creates some new female characters -like a young Venezuelan immigrant; Change the age of the protagonist’s daughter, who passes from a child to teenager; and introduces in the past of the character of Darín his participation in the War of the Falklands and the traumas he drags (which is a brilliant decision, which works very well). On the other hand, the television version is not daring with the bold start of the comic – of the whole unusual for his time – in which a mysterious individual – the eternal, time traveler – appears to the scriptwriter himself, Oesterheld – who makes himself a character of his comic – tells him his incredible story.
The six chapters of the Netflix series adapt only the first part of the original comicwith what is pending a second part, in which the riskiest decisions will arrive, because it is from there that the science fiction elements linked to the alien invasion propose the most daring turns.
In 1969 Oesterheld decided to launch a new more ambitious and politicized version of The Eternalutawith the Uruguayan installed in Argentina Alberto Breccia, a Pasting Draftor inventive and boldness. They had already collaborated in several previous works, among which another summit of the Argentine comic stands out: Mort Cinder. The new version began to be published in the weekly Peoplebut the radicality of the Breccia Drawing – Management of Claroscuro, rupture with the vignettes format – baffled readers and the series was closed abruptly within a few months. Faced with the more than 300 pages of the original, this new version has just over 50. Now, coinciding with the premiere of the Netflix series, reservoir books first publishes in Spain the restored edition of THE ETERNAUTA 1969.
In 1976, a year before his disappearance, Oesterheld, already very radicalized, published The Eternaluta IIagain with Solano López to the pencils, uncomfortable and disagreement with the ideological bias of this new installment, which is also much lower than the original. Already without oesterheld have continued to appear several sequels of The Eternalutawith other screenwriters and cartoonists. None of them have the original cartoon magic, which has now become a Netflix series stimulant. The Eternaluta Keep traveling over time.
