Shapira is a comics critic who writes for several venues including Haaretz, The Comics Journal, PanelXPanel and others.
People are afraid to leave the house. Death lurks at every corner. Those who nevertheless must go out, to get food or other necessary products, wear a mask. The authorities are unable to provide an answer. There is a vague sense of apocalyptic destruction on the way – all the permanent world orders have changed in an instant.
This is not a retrospective of the last year, but rather an old science fiction story, The Eternaut.
The Eternaut (originally El Eternauta, ‘the traveler through eternity’) is an Argentinian comic book that was originally published in sequels between 1957 and 1959 and earned its two creators, writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld and artist Francisco Solano López, world fame amongst comic book fans in South America and Europe. Since its publication, the work has received a series of sequels and has become deeply embedded in the political consciousness of South America – where you can still find graffiti of the masked heroes, their sharp eyes barely visible.
Graffiti inspired by The Eternauta // El Eternau
The reason people hide in their houses in the story is not an invisible plague but the appearance of a mysterious snow that kills anyone who comes in contact with it. Anyone who was not inside the house died instantly. The few survivors, including the narrator, Juan Salvo, his family members, and some of his close friends, have to improvise body suits and masks that cover them from head to toe in an attempt to survive. In the newly created world, a trip to the grocery store is as dangerous as crossing a battlefield. But the snow is only the first stage in a series of much more terrible developments, which the heroes of the story try to survive, with great difficulty. It is quickly discovered that the snow is not a natural disaster but a weapon of destruction l that is only part of a large-scale invasion. Quite early in the story, The Eternaut makes a turn from the horror genre to more conventional science fiction, but the beating heart of the story continues to bleed red.
The Eternaut does seem particularly relevant to the days of masks and fear, but the magic of the book that allowed it to survive for decades does not depend on current circumstances but on its understanding of human nature and Western society.
The story of the Eternaut is not the cause of death, but the brutal description of the social breakdown, and the realization of the heroes of the story, all ‘typical’ people from the middle class, that everything they know is about to change. Mechanisms they took for granted are disappearing one by one. But instead of becoming the tough loners we know from other post-apocalyptic texts, such as Mad Max or I Am Legend, the characters actually tend to unite together and create new, better structures.
The fact that there are many heroes and not a single one is of the utmost importance. Osterhold and Lopez, in days when the Cold War seems to threaten to heat up at any moment, write about people who are in the middle of a struggle against such great forces and use weapons that seem almost impossible. The comparison with the United States and the Soviet Union, who used smaller countries both as battlefields and as weapons, is inevitable. Against the American ideology, which empowers the individual and views the destruction of society as his opportunity for self-liberation (as if we are back to the cowboy days of the Wild West), The Eternaut presents a story in which ordinary people, members of the working class and the middle class, cooperate, without a single hero figure to cheer. The fact that the faces of the characters are always covered does not prevent them from maintaining their humanity – but it reminds the reader that in the end we are all human beings of equal importance, and no one stands out from the rest.
We learned to understand the act of wearing the mask as a small act of heroism. The mask does not only and necessarily protects you from the diseases of others, but it also protects others from your potential disease. Wearing a mask is a sacrifice – of comfort, of pleasantness, of freedom for self-expression. We do this not because it is the law, but because we care about other people.
This is what is at the heart of The Eternaut, people who understand that they themselves are not the center of the story, that they are not the sole protagonist of their own narrative. People who put on a mask and work together, for a better tomorrow – no matter how desperate the present seems.