Netflix’s new post-apocalyptic drama The Eternaut has taken the streaming giant by storm, becoming a global smash hit just days after its release and inviting comparisons to genre-defining standouts like The Last of Us and The Walking Dead. Before it found success on screens around the world, however, The Eternaut existed in an entirely different format — as a graphic novel, one that decades ago offered readers in Argentina a story of survival and resistance in an era of mounting repression.
Argentine writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld first published El Eternauta in 1957, and his serialized sci-fi comic imagined Buenos Aires buried under a deadly snowfall — the ominous start of a mysterious alien invasion. In the comic, readers saw everyday citizens left helpless beneath a snowfall that evoked Hiroshima’s black rain and Cold War-era dread. A small band of survivors emerges from the nightmare, donning gas masks and makeshift armor to ward off the snow’s instant lethality.
At the center of it all stands the Rick Grimes-like Juan Salvo, a grief-stricken man who becomes the reluctant leader of a ragtag resistance.
Over the years, especially with Oesterheld’s 1969 rewrite of the story, the symbolism in the story became more overtly political. He reimagined the narrative with a clearer anti-imperialist lens, portraying the alien invaders as a stand-in for oppressive systems — be they US intervention, authoritarian regimes, or global capitalism. By the time he was abducted in 1977 by agents of Argentina’s regime, his work had become deeply subversive.
In hindsight, the snowfall in The Eternaut can be read as an allegory: It’s silent, sudden, and deadly — like the fear and repression that blanketed Argentina during its era of military dictatorship.
As the country slid into brutal military rule in the 1970s, Oesterheld’s storytelling grew sharper, angrier, more urgent. In later versions of The Eternaut, the faceless invaders and creeping doom mirrored the paranoia and violence of life under a regime that silenced dissenters. By that point, however, Oesterheld was already gone, his work portraying the powerless rising up against faceless forces of control having made him a target of the dictatorship.
The ruling military junta, which seized power in 1976, launched a brutal campaign known as the “Dirty War,” during which an estimated 30,000 people were forcibly disappeared — including journalists, artists, and students. Oesterheld was one of them. His affiliation with leftist movements and his increasingly defiant storytelling — especially his rewritten version of The Eternaut, which cast the alien invaders as metaphors for authoritarian oppression — were viewed as threats to the regime. He was abducted along with his four daughters, and none was ever seen again.
That’s what gives Netflix’s The Eternaut its emotional voltage. Yes, the series is a dystopian epic with stunning visuals and survival stakes that rival any prestige drama. But beneath the sci-fi spectacle is a ghost story — one that speaks up for the lost and fights to preserve a truth that authoritarianism tried to erase. In resurrecting The Eternaut, Netflix didn’t merely revive a genre classic; the streamer amplified the voice of a vanished writer, bringing global consciousness to a story that once defied a regime.
