Netflix will turn the Argentine science fiction comic 'El Eternauta' into series

It snows in Buenos Aires. The flakes are of a phosphorescent green that attracts the attention of Buenos Aires, who still do not know that they kill the first contact. The streets of the Argentine capital will soon be a snowy cemetery, watered by victims of an alien invasion, the "they", which "the resistance" will fight in such Buenos Aires scenarios such as the River court or General Paz avenue. There are no statues of La Libertad or airplanes sent by the Pentagon in El Eternauta , considered the most emblematic comic in Argentina. El Eternauta is a science fiction story created in 1957 by screenwriter Héctor Germán Oesterheld and cartoonist Francisco Solano López. Six decades after the publication of the first three pages of the saga, Netflix has announced in Buenos Aires that it will turn the story into a series.

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The main streaming platform will pay off an old debt: despite its overwhelming popularity, El Eternauta was never brought to the screen. They tried directors like Adolfo Aristarain, Pino Solanas or Lucrecia Martel, who always collided with budget problems and legal conflicts. Netflix will now make an investment that he did not need and Juan Salvo, as the protagonist created by Oesterheld is called, will live under the direction of Bruno Stagnaro, responsible for Pizza , birra, faso and the Okupas series. The series will be available worldwide, not only in Argentina, between “2021 and 2022”, and will be a “contemporary version inspired by the graphic novel”. The announcement was made by the executive director of the platform, the American Reed Hastings, who traveled especially for it to Buenos Aires. From an auditorium in the La Boca neighborhood, Hastings said Netflix will also produce a series about Juan Manuel Fangio, the glory of Argentine car racing.

“Argentina is one of the ten countries with more subscribers in the world. Brazil and Mexico beat him by little. What we are going to do is continue to invest in content, ”Hastings said Wednesday. A day earlier, the manager met with President Alberto Fernández, with whom “he reviewed the company's investments in the country and future releases of Argentine productions for the audiovisual platform,” as they said from Casa Rosada.

Netflix's commitment to regionalize the contents of the platform is clear: Fangio is an Argentine hero without discussion and El Eternauta is the first science fiction comic devised on local stages, far from American topics. The strip was published between 1957 and 1959 for deliveries of three pages per week in the magazine Weekly Zero Hour . It was soon a success.

In an interview with Clarín newspaper in 1997, Solano López (1928-2011) gave the keys to such an impact: “A strong issue, the invasion, here, in Buenos Aires, fighting in General Paz and on the River court. And an underlying element: our feeling of peripheral country, harassed, at the mercy of what others decide. The Eternauta expressed that directly, and as many felt it, the comic set on. ” Oesterheld once said that the secret of success was in the idea of ​​community that conveyed the script, opposite to the scenes of lonely hero, and always American, that readers received from the north. “The true hero of El Eternauta is the collective hero, a human group. It reflects my intimate feeling: the only valid hero is the group hero, never the individual hero, the hero alone, "he said.

The personal story of the scriptwriter of El Eternauta helped the permanence of the story in the collective imaginary. In 1975, Héctor Germán Oesterheld had joined the armed Peronist group Montoneros. Two years later, the Armed Forces kidnapped him, tortured him and murdered him. Victims of state terrorism also fell their four daughters (two of them were pregnant), their two sons-in-law and two grandchildren. In 2010, the Kirchner youth took the character of El Eternauta to praise President Nestor Kirchner. With the diving suit that López put on Salvo and the face of the former president, El Nestornauta was born.