Laura Vzquez Translation by Ins Alicia Citadino

The Impossible Biography

The title I have chosen for this essay triggers some questions. Making them explicit will be useful to steer this text further and establish the path I expect to follow at some point.1 How can I write about Hctor Germn Oesterhelds political, professional and family life? Which of his itineraries will I reconstruct intentionally and which ones by chance? How can I give an account of the crossroads of biography with history? What can I tell about his life that his own work has not yet said in itself?2 What are the links between individual and collective memory?3 Narration basically consists of setting up a plot and constructing the place from which the narrator will observe the action.4 Every piece of discourse denes itself and its speakers as well through a choice. This choice obviously implies that other possibilities are omitted or set aside. As far as I am concerned, I believe that writing about Hctor Oesterhelds life and work is impossible. Or rather, it is perfectly possible. It is possible to do so in a thousand dierent ways, but all the versions taken together will not suce to explain and compose his life experience, i.e. those versions that address the relationship between politics and ction, between imaginary creation his own world and his fascination with ideology, in his capacity as an activist. It is therefore important that I warn the reader beforehand about this essays advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantages are manifold, to tell you the truth. Drawing up this biography will only partially reconstruct Oesterhelds career. An exhaustive overview of his enormous inuence on the medium of comics is not to be expected. I will not oer a detailed description of his works and contributions to Argentinas graphic media, nor am I interested in recounting his interaction with drawers and editors. The reader will not be presented with information about Oesterhelds private life, or more details about his connections with the Montonero guerrilla group, details which already have been made public. The advantage then: this work is presented as ctional from the outset. It has no intention other than to state that the crazy attempt to clearly describe Hctor Germn Oesterhelds life has been, at least for me and from the very beginning, an impossible task. At some point in the story, Oesterhelds life becomes incredible. Incidentally, I initially set out to interpret the facts of a life but I found myself shifting the objective over and over again. I feel that the script writers image is more powerful than his comics, at least from a local perspective.5 And I ask myself: why not forget this Oesterheld altogether? And my reply is: because what most attracts me to him is that he has turned into a commonplace. As he seems so unavoidable, how could I not feel tempted by the exercise of memory and historic reication?6 How will I manage to give an account of his history knowing beforehand that history will never tell us what happens in an authors inner self while he is writing? (Barthes 1992:177). This is the dilemma that haunts me incessantly: how will I talk about a writer of comics who disappeared during the last military dictatorship? Will I speak of his private life, revealing his secret passions? Will I retrace his activities as a Montonero militant?7 Will I put his work on show? I am afraid that the parts of this essay will never make a whole. This puzzle will always have some pieces missing. A plausible hypothesis is that history and ction are intimately intertwined. One of their purposes is, perhaps, to mould possible worlds, which does not mean real or probable worlds.8 And Oesterhelds story is ctional in this sense too. In the following section of this essay, I will recount some of the diculties I encountered while writing this biography. Going over some of these issues, a number of conclusions will become apparent.

Life and Work

The intellectual and literary tendencies in Argentina during the last military dictatorship9 should not be divided into being inside or outside of the conict (I must note that comic strips and cartoons are neither an intellectual nor a literary products).10 This division merely illustrates the dictatorships success in breaking up and overriding the cultural eld. Widespread critical and political writing writing as a way to settle old scores ourished during the early eighties. But in the Argentina of the seventies, narrative texts except for those studied during the period by literary critics, and in communication and cultural analyses were controlled at the institutional level. The comic book market, due to its massive and popular character, underwent the same surveillance. However, there were exceptions: some literary works, texts and comics eluded repression. Some song lyrics, theatre scripts and novels managed to escape as well. But those gaps in Government power which allowed other voices to be heard were just occasional ukes and do not reect a systematic deance of ocial authority.11 What I mean to say is that there were no free spaces because censorship was at its most radical in that period, and the fact that some works had outwitted authorities through clandestine publications, articles in social science magazines with limited circulation or material by exiled artists does not mean, in contrast to what certain academic publications of the transitional period maintain, that the dictatorship was not absolutely eective in imposing its culture of fear. Even when it was not able to control everything, the level of control was enough to establish a system of eective coercion and domination.12 The critique evinced by intellectuals and artists was formulated metaphorically and remained within certain margins, through texts and carefully planned marked by an agonizing double meaning. These were broken and irregular voices; the symptoms of a suocating society.13 The dictatorship, through its imposition of state terror, deleted all free oppositional spaces. As a consequence, the production of comics brought out only a few critical or disruptive works.14 Interestingly, these few expressions appeared in dierent types of publications because they were created by authors who embraced dierent ideological points of view, artistic styles and writing strategies. Summing up, there were few possibilities for comic strips during the dictatorship, but the alternative

Laura Vazquez The Impossible Biography www.camouagecomics.com

works that existed may be found in a wide array of media, ranging from the most popular to less widely read publications.15 Now we could make four lists of writers even though the word list has terrible connotations in Argentine society: four lists comprising those who stayed and fought by means of their writing, those who joined the armed struggle and survived, those who died and those who had to or chose to live in exile. However, I believe that such lists add nothing that might help us understand the nuances dierentiating personal experience from historical events. The rst problem that emerges upon writing Oesterhelds biography is that the authors name should appear in each list, except the list of exiled. There is also the hypothesis that the military kidnapped and killed intellectuals and writers, not because of what they wrote but because of what they did when they were not writing. This logic could be used to explain why Rodolfo Walsh, Paco Urondo, Haroldo Conti, Raymundo Gleyzer, Enrique Raab and Hector Germn Oesterheld, amongst many others, disappeared. What I mean to indicate is that the singular and unique stature of script writers as paradigmatic gures seems arbitrary if we omit that they were part of a peculiar relationship between politics and literature or between the militant and the intellectual which marked the Argentina of the sixties and seventies.16 In Claudia Gilmans words: The sixties/seventies was a period with its own historical signicance with a more or less precise limit, separating it from the previous and following years. This period is surrounded by thresholds that entitle it to be considered as a temporal-conceptual entity (Gilman 2003: 36). An instrumental view on writing tends to put an authors life and work on the same level, as if these were watertight distinctions. Are you really what you write? Do you coincide with what you say? Possible answers to these queries are debatable, to say the least. The thought that the scriptwriter Oesterheld was destined to become a revolutionary seems wrong to me. I also disagree with the view that Oesterhelds comics, which were not exactly naive, sealed his fate. People who support this thesis do not take into account the patterns of identity of that period and the intellectuals self-criticism. The childish belief that Hctor lived his life as if it were one of his scripts and that his scripts reected his life only helps those who do not

Laura Vazquez The Impossible Biography www.camouagecomics.com

want, or are not able to recognize an important fact: Oesterheld joined a revolutionary political project because he believed in it, because he was sure that his sacrice could change the world. He did not see his decision as an adventure or as one of his comic heroes adventures. I do not think that Oesterheld considered himself to be hero. His position was that of the omniscient narrator: he saw himself as one who watches and tells, not as someone who acts. This is the same role he gave to character-narrators such as Ezra Winston in Mort Cinder, Jubilado Luna in Sherlock Time, Caleb in Ticonderoga or himself in El Eternauta who are all narrator-witnesses to the real heroes. I believe Oesterheld felt that he was carrying out an inspirational task: he was the chronicler of a heroic gesture (that of the Montoneros): by means of his comics he wanted to put into words the eectiveness of the party and the success of the revolutionary will. A story he would never be able to tell. From this position he tried to change reality, which does not mean to step out of reality. The politicizing of literature has a long history (since Zola became the paradigm for the intellectual-writer as critic, towards the end of the nineteenth century). For a committed author, words mean action: the writer who composes a novel is a writer, but if he speaks about torture in Algeria, then he is an intellectual (Morin 1960: 35). Nevertheless, one should question whether intellectual is the right term to dene a scriptwriter of comics. In the present essay, of course, Oesterheld is considered an intellectual gure of his times. In 1968, Oesterheld wrote an original comic script for Enrique Lipszycs book La Historieta Mundial.17 In it, he recounted, sequence by sequence, his own life up to the moment when his own editorial company reached its greatest success. This autobiographical script illustrates the authors ironic approach to life and work: 24 Bottom: Thus the hero reaches literary glory and, at the same time, signicantly improves his nancial situation: he quits the publishing house he had wished for so long to forget about... 25 Down: ...And he starts working at the newspaper La Prensa as a copy editor, earning four times the salary he used to get. Six hours, from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. Now he can study... and take his girlfriend to the pictures with the tickets they give him at the newspaper!

Laura Vazquez The Impossible Biography www.camouagecomics.com

26: The hero goes with his girlfriend for a walk along tree-lined roads with old country houses. The most romantic autumn scene; leaves twirling and falling. Bottom: Both fortune and his girlfriend accompany the hero; he passes his exams at the University, gets a job in tune with his career: leaves La Prensa and starts working at a mining laboratory. 27 Semi close-up of O. dressed in an overall, pounding a bag of minerals to powder with a grinder; a serious expression on his face, powder, a shed, machine noise. Bottom: Its heavy work, but O. nds the necessary time to keep on studying, to keep on taking his girlfriend to the cinema, to keep on writing... If Oesterhelds life and work were a continuum, that is to say, if he really translated his political thought into his work an assessment that should be analyzed in detail he did not do so in order to use his comics as a weapon: he did it with the purpose of transferring his world view into his comics.18 He wrote political scripts for both the Montoneros weekly, El Descamisado (the comic strip Latinoamrica y el Imperialismo. 450 Aos de Guerra was published in the Montoneros weekly between 1973 and 1974) and for Gente, a magazine clearly favorable to the Junta.19 It is remarkable that Oesterheld was hired between 1970 and 1975 by the publisher Columba to do a job that was completely new to that company.20 In 1969 Oesterheld wrote a new version of El Eternauta (this time illustrated by Alberto Breccia), at the request of the publishing house Atlntida.21 Oesterheld agreed to write the script, and in issue 201 of the magazine Gente the new comic appeared. It was immediately rejected by the magazines readership, which is why the story was cancelled in issue no. 217, which also included a letter of apology from the publisher. A second part was to be published in 1976 this time with drawings by Francisco Solano Lpez, the same illustrator as in the original version of 195722 on the request of Record Publishing, where Oesterheld was employed at the time he went missing. On the subject of invasion he also wrote La Guerra de los Antartes in 1970, with drawings by Len Napo (Monghiello Ricci), published in Dos Mil Uno magazine, which was edited by Alejandro Vignatti.23 On 22 February 1974, a second version of La Guerra de los Antartes was published with

Laura Vazquez The Impossible Biography www.camouagecomics.com

drawings by Gustavo Trigo in the newspaper Noticias, but the series was cancelled when the police closed the newspaper ofce by executive order.24 Oesterheld had already been exceptionally active in political narrative. Examples include La Vida del Che of 1968, illustrated by Enrique and Alberto Breccia, which was followed a couple of years later by Evita: Vida y Obra de Eva Pern (1970), illustrated by Alberto Breccia. But his scripts were not enough to make him a militant. He would reach the people by other means. Although Oesterheld was convinced that the main function of comics was to enhance social consciousness and at the same time to entertain, at some point along his personal trajectory this role made him uncomfortable. What I mean is that his comics had succeeded in questioning the dichotomy art versus popular culture, while they had not been so eective so as to cast doubt on the problematic relation between politics and the masses.25 He then decided to link more closely to his people by forging a relationship that went further than the one oered through the interaction between his daily comics and his readers. In order to achieve this purpose, he chose to join the excluded and became a Peronist, even if he did not particularly want to.26 This is why, in my opinion, his work as scenarist does not suce to understand his political decisions, nor do his ctions help me in the reconstruction of his biography, which is also part of a historical period. The result is not satisfactory because it ignores what Oesterhelds political clandestineness was all about. What he felt. What happened at the crossroads. The contradictions within. If I could ask him something I would like to know why he, who had sacriced everything for his job as a comics scriptwriter, subsequently could sacrice his writing for a political project.27 When and how did he make this decision?28 On the other hand, his late entrance into militancy he was 58 when he was killed seems to bespeak motives other than merely political or ideological. Nobody could understand why an old man like him was tempted by the Montoneros activities, especially because an old man like him had many better things to do than get caught by a violent passion: a peaceful life and solid career.29 Many times I have heard that there is a before and after in Hctor Oesterhelds life. While young people make political and ideological decisions based on passion and life, also in terms of a revolutionary future, in Oesterhelds case these options were closed.

Laura Vazquez The Impossible Biography www.camouagecomics.com

So I ask myself once again: did anything happen in the middle that made things change their normal course?30 This question leads me to the problematic link between Oesterhelds aliation with a political group and his family ties.31 Were family ties stronger than political ones? Another question I ask myself: why do I need to resort to his emotional life as a means of reconstructing his political life? I mean, why do the stories about his past experiences constantly mix up the historical and the personal? Why jumble not only political but also emotional aspects, not only militancy but also friendship, not only historical and public events but also his home routines and the framework of his personal relations? Is there any biographical signicance in pointing out that Hctor used to mow the lawn, that his daughters were beautiful and that they were good students, that his house in Beccar32 was warm and comfortable?33 Once again, emotional and private matters are intermingled with history. Talking about Oesterhelds life is not the same thing as talking about his work. But his life and historical facts do not match completely either. Life is always more than the sum of facts. To grasp the whole meaning of a life, either Oesterhelds or anyone elses, is impossible even in terms of an autobiography. Memory is as dubious as this essay. What Oesterheld might have said about himself would have helped us to reach the truth, of course. But he would not have been able to be objective about himself, and thus the truth would never be known. We might have felt a bit more content, though. Luckily, Oesterheld is somehow present to remind us that historical facts are cyclical, that an exception (such as the snow of 1918) is always more than the mere proof that there is a rule.34 In the preface to the rst part of El Eternauta, published by Record Press in the sixties, Hctor Germn Oesterheld talks about his work: I have always been fascinated by Robinson Crusoe. I got that book when I was a little child; I must have read it at least twenty times. El Eternauta was, from the start, my own version of Robinson. A man who feels lonely, who is a prisoner, surrounded, not by the sea but in his case by death. Nevertheless, El Eternauta was not an isolated man but a sociable person who had a family, friends. That is the reason for the truco35 game, for the small family sleeping in the detached house at Vicente Lpez,36 unable to imagine the oncoming invasion. That was the beginning. The rest... the rest followed naturally, the same as how everyday life constitutes itself or so we think. 7

Laura Vazquez The Impossible Biography www.camouagecomics.com

On the Use of Interviews

In order to write this biography, I used dierent contacts, people that Oesterheld had known personally, from work or intellectual debates and exchanges. These people talked to me about the author and thereby helped me to at least endow the writer with a biographical body. The people I interviewed sitting quietly, far removed from the frenzy and anxiety of the past made an imaginary journey. But this journey did not consist of a shift in time from an old world to a new one: in this case the travelers felt suspended: proximity and distance became blurred. The persons interviewed knew that their journey to the past, the duty they had taken upon themselves by oering their testimony, would not present them with any conclusive answers.37 The questions I asked myself during the interviews were: who is this person I am interviewing, is it someone speaking about his or her memories or is it someone re-creating a particular moment? What are the episodes or anecdotes he or she chooses and what are the things he or she discards? What is he or she leaving out? Some of these people told me about Hctor: his everyday duties, his domestic life. Others told me about Oesterheld: his professionalism in writing comics, his profound intellectualism, his encyclopedic knowledge, his humanistic beliefs. Not surprisingly though, the value of these stories lies in their power to conrm old certainties: the people I interviewed Oesterhelds friends, relatives, colleagues; they all repeated the same opinions and phrases over and over. The answers were friendly, sympathetic; they oered me memories that surfaced gently without provocation or confusion. The only problem was that Oesterhelds story could only be understood when grounded in a historical context. In any case, what really counts is that the persons I interviewed were marked by the present, which also determined what events they remembered from the past and how they remembered them. Regarding experiences, their transmission and variations of social memory, Hugo Vezzetti argues that memory is not immune to time. If we talk about a mind that goes back to the past from the present, we should take into account that in Argentina, from 1983 onwards, the re-created perspective in the present is constantly moving (Vezzetti, 2002: 191).

Laura Vazquez The Impossible Biography www.camouagecomics.com

Consequently, facts are mixed with ction and create a myth.38 Politics and life on the one side, but also emotional and professional matters on the other, make all possibilities of coherence, order or wholeness impossible for narratives such as these. I know that the whole I was able to construct is made of biographical traces and accidental choices (wholeness is just fake, Adorno said). This piece of writing has a historical shape, but it is not Oesterhelds true story. It cannot be his true story because I cannot prove its accuracy. And that is all. My hypothesis is that the people I interviewed knew that they were composing a biography: they saw it as a task; as a necessity in some cases, as a command in others.39 But all of them co-operated; all of them wanted to add pieces to the puzzle, to put together the pieces of a broken mirror whose image can never be restored. Stubbornly, perhaps, they also wanted to understand and clarify why what happened had happened. One single question guided all their accounts: What should we do with the past? Oesterhelds persona seems to be surrounded by mystery, by the necessity to explain (to oneself) things that, to a certain extent, are inexplicable. Hctor Germn Oesterheld was born on 23 July 1919. The records mention 27 April 1977 as the day he was kidnapped. According to dierent sources it happened in La Plata, but there is no denite agreement on this. Eduardo Arias, the Argentine to see Oesterheld alive, and who reports that the latter was in a terrible condition, declared that Oesterheld was imprisoned at least until January of 1978 (Garca y Ostuni, 2002: 140). Hctor is thought to have died in Mercedes, a town near Buenos Aires City, within the rst four months of 1978. Only his wife, Elsa Snchez de Oesterheld, and his two grandsons, Fernando and Martn Mrtola Oesterheld, survived (cf. Bordel 2002). Oesterheld was kidnapped and shot during the last military dictatorship, the self-styled Process of National Re-organization. He was imprisoned in the military barracks of Campo de Mayo and La Tablada. Together with his four daughters, Estela, Beatriz, Marina and Diana, and his sons-in-law, he belongs to the thirty thousand gone missing in Argentina between 1976 and 1983. We could think that all might have ended dierently: if only he had not gone to that appointment, if only he had not been a militant, if only a few of his daughters had survived, if only he had been younger... or old enough, if only his wife had loved him dierently... or not loved him at all, if only that shanty town had not been so close to his house in the beautiful quarter of Beccar, if only his daughters had kept on going to private schools, if only he had been a bit more indierent or a bit less bold and, at last, if only he had not been touched by the sign of the times.... But fatal coincidences contain the traces of destiny, a destiny that Oesterheld, in my opinion, never tried to avoid.

Laura Vazquez The Impossible Biography www.camouagecomics.com

Notes
1 I will surely return to these questions in my doctoral thesis about Argentinean comics (directed by Dr. Mirta Varela), which I am writing at present for the School for Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), supported by a scholarship from the CONICET (National Council of Scientic and Technical Research). 2 Beyond the well known argument concerning the multiple modes of interaction between both types of narrative and due to the narrative condition they both share, ction seems to step over historical bounds and establishes itself as an area of debate and confrontation. About the controversy raised by the relationship between ction and history, see Balderston et al. (1987). 3 Collective memory and individual memory pose dierent problems and have dierent features. It is not the intention of this work to give an account of the extensive research carried out on these processes. However, it is necessary to point out that the distinctions between memory and history have dominated a considerable amount of research on collective memory (Nora, 1984; Yehushalmi, 1984; Halbwachs, 1997). In the same way, the dierences established by some authors between memory and truth and/or memories and imagination are fundamental (Ricoeur, 1999; Schmucler, 1999). 4 That is, whether or not blurring permanently or transitory contents and representations in order to underline, evoke or make some others recognizable (Vezzetti, 2002). 5 Paradoxically and in spite of the important place that comics have maintained within the massive eld of literature, they have been treated as marginal or peripheral phenomena. Comics have not been included in literary history, probably because they are not real literature or, more suspiciously, because they are not worthy enough to be considered as literature. Therefore, the argument might go, this sort of thing should be analyzed as a mere product of a cultural industry or the expression of a national system of writing at a specic historical moment. 6 In this respect it is useful to repeat the words of Andreas Huyssen (2002: 25): we cannot discuss personal, generational or public memory without considering the new medias enormous inuence as a vehicle for memory. Recomposing a biography by the superimposition of memories on facts is a theoretical and methodological problem. This apparent dialog which mixes two time-registers, i.e. the present of memory and the past of history adduces several contradictions. Most of all, because images pictures, videos, and various other sources are seen as reinforcements of verbal testimony (this is the case of interviews, for instance) and conducive to emotional memory. 7 It is not my purpose to discuss the details and evolution of the Montonero group in this essay. I will make us of Beatriz Sarlos words, then, to hint at some of the movements features: Violence and sin, theology of violence and theology of sin, nothing else was needed: Montoneros came out from this historical crossroads between political radicalization and religious radicalization. They were avengers, prophetic informers, martyrs of an irredeemable Nation where crimes had remained unpaid: that was the real outrage (Sarlo 2003: 172). 8 Although reality and ction follow dierent forms of logic, at an almost miraculous point, a poetic point, they intersect: one interpretation reveals the conict between both forms of logic and reveals that the logic proposed for reality contradicts the text logic, or that the text logic is more persuasive and consistent than the logic attributed to reality. At this intersection, ction is omnipotent and speaks about everything, without limits. (Sarlo, 1995) 9 The political violence in Argentina during the seventies intensied following the confrontations within the Peronist faction. Faced with the impending death of Juan Domingo Pern, extreme right-wing groups attached to power, youth organizations, workers unions and armed groups started a struggle that spread to other social groups. On 24 March 1976, a military coup dtat headed by General Jorge Rafael Videla overthrew Mara Estela Martnez de Perns constitutional government and imposed a dictatorship that perfected the repressive mechanisms by means of illegal imprisonment, torture and disappearance a cruel euphemism that attained international notoriety. In 1983 a democratic government succeeded the dictatorship. 10 The comic, due to its specicity as a graphic story, constitutes a unique type of discourse based on drawn narration. As a product of culture industry, the comic takes part in shaping subjectivity and conforming social identities. In this aspect, it represents an active form within the cultural debates of a whole period. 11 Some examples of narratives of resistance during the military dictatorship are: Respiracin articial, 1980, by Ricardo Piglia; La vida entera, 1981, by Juan Carlos Martini and Conversacin al Sur, 1981, by Marta Traba. It must be stressed that all these stories originated towards the end of the dictatorship and not during the rst years of State terrorism. 12 During the period immediately following the dictatorship, which ended in 1983, attempts to disclose dierent aspects of recent history proliferated. In this context, every form of resistance to the dictatorship received special attention, either concerning alternative literary works or implied social practices. As such, phenomena such as rock music, literature and alternative magazines were foregrounded and, to a certain extent, established a breeding ground for new movements within youth culture (Quoted from the UBACYT project paper Cultura, medios y dictadura: memorias en conicto, directed by Dr. Mirta Varela, whose research group I participate in). 13 For a more comprehensive account, see Ficcin y poltica. La narrativa argentina durante el proceso militar. Balderston, Daniel et al. Alianza Estudio, Buenos Aires, 1987. 14 Ideological alternatives to the dominant culture came about in popular and mass media in several, sometimes contradictory, ways. For instance, some of the comics created during the military dictatorship questioned the regimes repressive action and confronted authoritarian rule. Nevertheless, they scarcely had any inuence on subsequent intellectual and academic debates. 15 Though this does not fall within the scope of the present article, it is worth bearing in mind that, from the rst critical genre analyses and formalist tendencies in the seventies, a growing tension concerning medium legitimacy can be traced between narrative popularization and intellectualization. This theoretical gap played havoc with culture. While the avant-garde overcame and took the aective structures of a period further (Williams 1980: 150-158) and, along with it, its praxis widened the gap between itself and its public comic books, being immersed in mass culture, allowed us to examine the dierential value of certain cultural products. From a particular historical moment, Argentine comics functioned as a constant compromise between massive production and individual craftsmanship. In other words, the interaction between comic book serials and independent comics transformed the internal organization of the comic strip eld. 16 Certainly, comics are not part of literature, but it is appropriate to analyze them as instances of mass media narrative and treat them as texts that managed to exist outside the norms and helped to train readers from popular sections of society. 17 Between 15 October and 15 November 1968, the First Biennial of Cartoon and Graphic Humor took place at the Di Tella Institute. The Pan American School of Arts and the intellectuals associated with the Arts Research Center of the Institute co-operated to set up the show. Despite the times of crisis, the event attracted more than 30,000 people. Not all the visitors were readers of comics; the reasons for such public interest were manifold. The Biennial was a massive cultural phenomenon and, more importantly, a social token of the times. 18 It is not known for sure whether this decisive step taken by Oesterheld occurred prior to his four daughters (Estela, Diana, Beatriz and Marina) and his sons-in-laws membership of the Montoneros. Never mind; all this is part of the legend created around Oesterhelds gure, a legend that has grown along the years. Fleeing, living clandestinely, the permanent disruption of his life... these were all part and parcel of his everyday life, which were kept a secret. His wife utterly ignored his militancy and perhaps her daughters and so did the publishing world. Nothing seemed to have changed, in appearance, but in fact everything had taken a U-turn (Mora Bordel: 2002).

Laura Vazquez The Impossible Biography www.camouagecomics.com

10

19 On the publication in Gente, I quote an excerpt from an interview (Trillo and Saccomano: 1980) with Oesterheld, with Carlos Trillo joining in: Oesterheld: El Eternauta in Gente was a failure. And it failed because it was not suitable for that magazine. At that time, I was another man. I wouldnt be able to do it again now. And Breccia, for his part, was another man too. Eternauta had its good and bad points. On the one hand, its literary message. On the other hand, there is its graphic message. Regarding the former I found out much later that entire paragraphs had been cut. Trillo: The story, I believe, was shut down by the editor. The story of that edition, I mean. Oesterheld: Indeed. The readers were sending insulting letters to the editorial house because they were publishing that comic. That was why we had to hasten and nish it earlier and reach the end, the outcome. 20 During the seventies, the concept of comic changed, acquiring a more adult prole. The publishing strategies vary this was evident in the magazines published by Columba; the comic increasingly intermingled with other genres of mass media; the national issues and the interaction between local and big international publishing houses became predominant. In this period, comics adopted a more serious style. 21 The story was spread over 17 issues, and was 50 pages long; the rst issue was published on 29 May, during the Cordobazo, a popular uprising in the Argentinian province of Crdoba directed against General Onganas dictatorship. Oesterheld did not ignore the political oppression. 22 El Eternauta was published for the rst time on 4 September 1957, in the rst issue of the magazine Hora Cero Semanal, with Editorial Frontera, and it continued till 1959. 23 In the same year he created the characters Artemio, a Buenos Aires Taxi Driver and Russ Congo. At that time he joined the largest and most popular comic publishing house, Columba. There he started writing the scripts for several serials that Columba was already publishing in some of its magazines. 24 Oesterheld, who was already working for the Montoneros editorial branch, used the pen name Francisco G. Vzquez. 25 His publishing house, Frontera, was the source of the modern national comic because its magazines, Hora Cero and Frontera were clearly detached from the black-or-white attitude prevalent at that moment. Oesterhelds scripts were illustrated by professionals such as Hugo Pratt, Solano Lpez, Roume, Breccia, Pavone, Haunt, Molitemi or Del Castillo. On the opposite side was the publisher Columba which issued the comic magazines Intervalo, Fantasa and DArtagnan. These magazines did not compare to the intricacies of plot line and design quality of the Frontera editions. After Fronteras demise in the mid sixties, comics were no longer a privileged eld for evasion and evolved in new aesthetic and thematic directions. A co-existence of the registers of high culture and lesser culture was put to the fore during this period. At the same time these mixed genres and aesthetic shifts were being discussed in academic and artistic circles. These new forms of graphic and written narration came to fruition at the beginning of the eighties, exemplied with the publication of the now mythical magazine Fierro (1984), by Ediciones Urraca. 26 It is useful to keep in mind Carlos Altamiranos question: what pushed the revolutionary Christians, or better, what had pushed some Christians towards the idea of a revolution? There is probably no simple answer to this question. Identifying the facts that immediately activated a phenomenon common to most Latin American countries seems less complicated. As regards these facts, all opinions coincide: the will to get out of the besieged fortress originated in the Second Vatican Council and forced people to start a dialogue with the actualities of contemporary reality. (Altamirano 1996: 3). 27 Ambition and desire for prestige, everyone has it. When I think about my family insisting that I write a great novel... Yes, it would entail more status, I reckon. It is something completely dierent. For my wife and daughters, for instance, it would be dierent to say Im Borges or Sabatos wife than to say Im the wife, daughter, of a comic scriptwriter. Personally, I feel more satised writing for a mass readership. But let us be realistic: not many famous writers wrote in ideal conditions. (Interview with Hctor Oesterheld by Carlos Trillo and Guillermo Saccomano; published in 1980). 28 It would be useful to consider Oesterheld as part of a wider movement in the literary eld of his time. During the sixties and seventies, written works were legitimated by the parameter of politics and public space was the stage where writers gained authority and turned into intellectuals (Gilman 2003: 29). 29 Martn Mortola, Oesterhelds grandson, recounts: When my granddad left our home, everything got messed up: a happy home, four wonderful daughters, a marriage... Do you understand? (HGO: 1998) 30 It might be an interesting exercise for this essay to ask ourselves about the meaning of the term extraar (to nd strange). In Spanish, to nd something strange means to put away, to set aside, to banish: To nd something strange is the awkward eect that something uncommon, not belonging to us or inappropriate, has on us, or else, something that was well known to us and has now become unfamiliar and surprises us when it appears (Thiebaut 2004: 12). In this case, the moments before and after in Oesterhelds life point to a rupture with our expectations, a breach caused by the failure of our cognitive and emotional models. As a public gure, Oesterheld interrupts the process of identication because he represents something that was and now is not. Someone who cannot be named (who was this Oesterheld in reality?) cannot be identied. 31 We can state with certainty that Oesterheld joined the Montoneros after at least two of his daughters had already joined the group. 32 Beccar is a district on the outskirts of Buenos Aires (translators note). 33 He was a comfort-loving, easygoing man. He needed peace and calm. For instance, he would go to the garden very early in the morning to pull the weeds; he could be seen wandering about, gardening, and watering the plants in the summertime... People surely thought this man must be living on his private income, he does nothing. But these were the moments when he would create his characters and his stories... (Elsa Snchez. HGO, 1993). 34 On 22 and 23 June 1918, snow came down for the rst time ever on the city of Buenos Aires. Id like to remind the readers that snow fell a second time on that day in 1967, within the pages of El Eternauta. It is unlikely to snow in a city like Buenos Aires. But it did snow, believe it or not, in Buenos Aires. 35 Truco is a traditional Argentine card game played with Spanish cards (translators note). 36 Vicente Lpez is a district on the outskirts of Buenos Aires (translators note). 37 These words are transcribed from the documentary HGO (Stefanello and Bailo: 1993): I cant believe that those sons of a bitch who were crazy about Oesterhelds comics were the ones who would kill him in the end (Miguel Repiso); My life has got holes impossible to ll, because of the circumstances my family had to live in (Martn Mortola); What strange things must have gone on in that family... dont you think? (Marcos Lole); There are many questions. I would like to know what really went on too (Hebe Naess); This is what I wanted to ask him... Why did you do it? What did they ll your head with? Why did you do that? That was not how you were... (Elsa Snchez); The feeling of being a survivor felt, many times, like being a traitor (Miguel Fernndez Long). 38 One might agree with the statement that a myth exerts the highest identicatory power, it brings about identication because it is able to organize images that instinctively invoke all feelings (Sarlo, 2003: 175). 39 Hugo Vezzetti provides an enriching view on the importance of testimony and the role of the witness. See Vezzetti, 2002: 206-207.

Laura Vazquez The Impossible Biography www.camouagecomics.com

11

References Altamirano, Carlos, 1996. Montoneros, Punto de Vista, n 55. Bailo, Vctor and Daniel Stefanello, 1998. HGO [documentary lm] (Buenos Aires). Balderston, Daniel et. al., 1987. Ficcin y poltica. La narrativa argentina durante el proceso militar (Buenos Aires: Alianza). Barthes, Roland, 1992. Sobre Racine (Mxico: Siglo XXI Editores). Garca, Fernando and Hernn Ostuni. El Eternauta, Revista latinoamericana de estudios sobre la historieta, 2: 7 (La Habana) (the quote is taken from the book Nunca Ms, from the Informe de la Comisin Nacional sobre la Desaparicin de Personas, 1984). Gilman, Claudia, 2003. Entre la pluma y el fusil. Debates y dilemas del escritor revolucionario en Amrica Latina (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores). Huyssen, Andreas, 2002. En busca del tiempo perdido. Cultura y memoria en tiempos de globalizacin (Buenos Aires, Fondo de Cultura Econmica). Lipszyc, David and Oscar Masotta, 1968. Catlogo de la historieta mundial (Buenos Aires: Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Escuela Panamericana de Arte). Longoni, Ana and Mariano Mestman, 2000. Del Di Tella a Tucumn arde (Buenos Aires: El cielo por asalto). Mora Bordel, Javier, 2002. HGO, Revista digital Tebeosfera http://www.tebeosfera.com Morin, Edgar, 1960. Intellectuels: critique du mythe et mythe de la critique in Arguments n 20, 4th semester. Ortiz, Renato, 2002. Otro territorio. Ensayos sobre el mundo contemporneo (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes). Sarlo, Beatriz, 1995. Borges, un escritor en las orillas (Buenos Aires: Ariel). _____, 2003. La pasin y la excepcin (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores). Thiebaut, Carlos, 2004. La identidad extraada. Mapas, tiempos, guras. Boletn de esttica. Publicacin del Programa de Estudios de Filosofa del Arte y la Literatura, Centro de Investigaciones Filoscas, Buenos Aires. Trillo, Carlos and Guillermo Saccomano, 1980. Historia de la historieta argentina (Buenos Aires: Editorial Record). Vezzetti, Hugo, 2002. Pasado y Presente. Guerra, dictadura y sociedad en Argentina (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores). Williams, Raymond, 1980. Marxismo y literatura (Barcelona: Pennsula).

Laura Vazquez The Impossible Biography www.camouagecomics.com

12