The Eternaut

Oesterheld's gritty and ruminative series, published in an Argentinian newspaper from 1957 to 1959, is one of the great alien-invasion stories of the golden age of SF. But until the long-overdue arrival of this beautiful, highly gift-worthy slipcased edition, it was practically unknown in the broader comics world, a status soon to change. One night in Buenos Aires, Juan Salvo is playing poker with his buddies when snow starts falling. But it's not just a weather anomaly%E2%80%94it's the deadly first wave of an alien invasion. A taut against-all-odds plot quickly snaps into gear, with Juan and his buddies fashioning deep-sea survival suits and tromping through an eerily empty, snow-shrouded city to do battle with ever more deadly waves of remote-controlled monsters. Lopez's noirish black-and-white art, the equal of his EC Comics contemporaries, cleverly highlights both Oesterheld's moody philosophizing and the high-octane action scenes. The complicated twists and existential bleakness deliver a richly mysterious experience. As with much '50s science fiction, the political subtext%E2%80%94made more poignant by the knowledge that Oesterheld agitated against the Argentinean government and was "disappeared" in 1977%E2%80%94is so smoothly embedded in the plot that it slides right past most readers while still resonating once the true masterminds are revealed. (Nov.)