Héctor Germán Oesterheld (writer), F. Solano López (artist)
El eternauta
Hora Cero Semanal #8
Frontera, 1957
I was always fascinated by the idea of Robinson Crusoe. I was given the book as a gift when I was very young, and I must have read it more than twenty times. El Eternauta, initially, was my version of Robinson. The loneliness of man, surrounded, imprisoned, no longer by the sea but by death. Not Robinson’s lonely man either, but the man with a family, with friends. That’s why the truco game, that’s why the small family that sleeps in the chalet in Vicente López, oblivious to the invasion that is coming. The rest… the rest grew up on its own, just as, we believe, everyday life grows up on its own.
Héctor Germán Oesterheld, in the prologue of El eternauta