| Héctor Germán Oesterheld | |
|---|---|
Oesterheld, 1957 |
|
| Born | July 23, 1919 Buenos Aires, Argentina |
| Died | 1977 (age 58) |
| Nationality | Argentine |
| Area(s) | writer |
| Notable works | El Sargento Kirk Ernie Pike El Eternauta Mort Cinder La Vida del Che |
Héctor Germán Oesterheld (born July 23, 1919, disappeared and presumed dead 1977), also known as his common abbreviation HGO, was an Argentine journalist and writer of graphic novels and comics who has come to be celebrated as a master in his field.
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Oesterheld was born in Buenos Aires to a German father and a Basque mother. His early studies were in geology, which has been said to contribute to his acuity as a science fiction writer. He began his journalistic career in the early 1940s. His first work appeared in the daily La Prensa newspaper and then at the publishing house Codex.[1]
He then moved over to Abril publishers, where he began his extensive career as a comics writer. Soon after, he married Elsa Sánchez. Their first daughter, Estela, was born in 1952, Diana a year later, Beatriz in 1955 and Marina in 1957. Oesterheld was befriended by a group of postwar Italian comic writers, including Mario Faustinelli, Hugo Pratt, Ivo Pavone, and Dino Battaglia, also known as the Venice Group.[1] Together these artists and writers became part of what is known as the Golden Age of Argentine comics, which merged into an international scene of artists and writers whose works were published worldwide.
In 1957 he founded Ediciones Frontera, together with his brother Jorge, and went on to publish various comic magazines, including Hora Cero Semanal (weekly), Hora Cero Mensual (monthly), and Frontera Mensual (monthly). In 1958 he started writing El Eternauta, probably his most popular and critically acclaimed work. The strip, with artwork by Francisco Solano López told the story of his own meeting with a time traveler, who had already lived over 100 lives and has journeyed to the past to warn the protagonist of a future catastrophe. The strip was published in Hora Cero over 106 weekly episodes and was a massive success. However, the publishing house closed 5 years later due to a combination of the economic crisis sweeping Argentina in the 1960s, foreign competition, and the exodus of Argentine comic artists to Europe. He continued writing for other magazines such as Zig-Zag.
His work slowly acquired a greater political emphasis, with stories such as El Eternauta, Part II (1976), which describes a futuristic Argentina under a dictatorship; his 1968 biography of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, a year after Che's death, was removed from circulation by the government and the originals destroyed. In 1970 he wrote a scathing critical biography of Evita Peron, dedicated to Che. In 1973 he published 450 Years of War Against Imperialism. During the military government of the 1970s, Oesterheld is believed to have joined, following his four daughters, a leftist guerrilla group, the Montoneros.
In 1976 he disappeared, and a year later his daughters, Diana (21), Beatriz (19), Estela (25) and Marina (18), were arrested by the Argentine armed forces in La Plata, and were never seen again. His daughters' husbands were also among those that vanished. One grandson, Martín, was born in captivity and recovered from the government by Oesterheld's widow, Elsa Sánchez, and raised by her. A second, Fernando, born earlier, was raised by his paternal grandparents.
Elsa Sánchez participated in the protests of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and became one of the spokeswomen for the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which advocates for the return of children of the disappeared to their birth families.
When the Italian journalist Alberto Ongaro enquired about Oesterheld's disappearance in 1979, he received the reply: "We did away with him because he wrote the most beautiful story of Ché Guevara ever done".[1] Argentine journalist Jacobo Timmerman, in his memoir of his own captivity, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, recalls seeing Oesterheld across the hall in a prison in 1977. In a report to the Argentine National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, which published its findings in 1984 entitled Nunca Más, Eduardo Arias recalls seeing Oesterheld between November 1977 and January 1978, in terrible physical condition and at the secret detention center El Vesubio, which they sardonically named "the Sheraton".
Over a distinguished career, Oesterheld worked with some of the finest artists of his generation, including Hugo Pratt, Alberto Breccia, Francisco Solano López, Ivo Pavone, Dino Battaglia, as well as Horacio Altuna, José Massaroli, Eugenio Zoppi, Paul Campani, Gustavo Trigo, Julio Schiaffino and others. El Eternauta remains one of the key literary works of Argentine culture and is constantly reprinted for new audiences. His works are currently being reprinted in Argentina and around the world.
Footnotes