![]() In Oesterheld’s script, she is an almost divine figure, and her role as Perón’s good cop goes unexamined. His restored script for “Evita: Vida y Obra” opens with a denunciation of the bourgeoisie and a tribute to los descamisados, “the shirtless”-a slur that the Argentine right used against Perón’s supporters among the very poor, and which those supporters reclaimed with Evita’s encouragement. Like many Argentines, Oesterheld attached his hopes for a better future to Evita. He supported the establishment of Eva’s broad public charity, the Eva Perón Foundation, while using it to shore up his political power and spread propaganda. Juan Perón, a charismatic populist who assumed the Presidency in 1946, inflicted and inspired some of that violence, though his supporters were much more often the targets of brutal state repression. On March 14th of this year, it was published in its first English edition, as “ Evita: The Life and Work of Eva Perón,” translated by Erica Mena, for Fantagraphics.ĭuring Oesterheld’s life, though naked governmental corruption and violence were constant, Argentina enjoyed comparative prosperity among Latin American countries and a robust middle class, of which he was a member. A version of the comic book with Oesterheld’s script restored was published in Argentina, in 2002. ![]() The job of writing the story had ultimately been given to another writer. After the death of the artist Alberto Breccia, Oesterheld’s longtime collaborator, an editor named Javier Doeyo found Oesterheld’s original script for “Evita: Vida y Obra de Eva Perón,” a comic-book biography of Perón drawn by Breccia and his son, Enrique. Much of his work, especially his late work, saw publication in forms that were officially suppressed, and the effort to recover his writings has been long and arduous. In his memory, other writers continued to produce comics about his characters, including fictional versions of himself, granting him a posthumous career not as a pulp comic-book hero come to life but as a real-life guerrilla who became a comic-book hero. His boldness in the face of Argentina’s parade of violent and censorious dictators earned him a devoted following, but when, late in life, he became the kind of guerrilla fighter he admired, the government with which he had sparred so effectively in his stories crushed him with no more difficulty than it had thousands of others. He addresses his country’s problems elliptically, and in narrative forms that would have been familiar to young people browsing newsstands stocked with exciting stories, but his outrage at the status quo is unmistakable. In Oesterheld’s early stories, his political views are disguised, at least in part out of necessity. Read our reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction, updated every Wednesday. His work reflects a desperate search for heroism, at first in adventure stories and then among real-world figures like Eva Perón and Che Guevara, who star in his comics less as historical figures than as avatars of his passionate leftism. When his aliens invade an imaginary Argentina, feckless governments abandon a persecuted citizenry, who have to resist the invaders as guerrillas. His war stories privilege moral ambiguity over daring exploits. His cowboys are villains who oppress courageous Indians. When Oesterheld departed from convention, it was to tweak reigning pieties. Oesterheld and three of his four daughters were among los desaparecidos, “the disappeared,” those people who were kidnapped and almost certainly murdered by the regime the fourth died during a botched abduction.įor most of his life, Oesterheld was a beloved writer of pulp adventures-Westerns, stories of alien invasion, tales of the battlefield in the Second World War-that often bend or break genre rules. It was known mainly by its ironic nickname, the Sheraton. Oesterheld was a prisoner of the Argentine junta at some of its most notorious facilities, among them a detention and torture center situated in a police station in the Villa Insuperable neighborhood in the province of Buenos Aires. ![]() His physical condition was very bad indeed. Héctor Oesterheld was sixty years old when this ![]() Hands with all the prisoners present, one by one. Then Héctor said that as he was the oldest he wanted to shake They also allowed us to talk to each other for five The guards gave us permission to take off our hoods and smoke aĬigarette.
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