The Return of the Eternaut:
An interview with Solano López
An interview with Solano López
Source: Revista El Abasto (2012). English translation by Martin Hadis.
Evening was falling on Buenos Aires and the neighborhood was taking up that special sunset color so characteristic of certain twilights depicted in comic books. And there we were, heading for the home of one of the universal heroes of comic book illustration: Francisco Solano López who, together with Héctor Oesterheld, created The Eternaut
Solano López: I started drawing professionally five years before El Eternauta came out. I've been working professionally for fifty-five years now, because let's not forget that next year will mark the fiftieth anniversary of El Eternauta's first publication.
MS: And how old were you when you started working professionally?
SL: By the standards of the time, I started working late. I was twenty-three.
At Misterix, in Abril, I worked on Bull Rocket with Oesterheld. At that time,
Oesterheld was gaining fame for the Sargento Kirk comic strip drawn by Hugo Pratt. Oesterheld was also a kind of guide and director, behind the scenes, at the magazine Más Allá, which was a monthly publication, not of comics, but of science fiction. That's where he published the first episodes of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. And he also included a science fiction story from time to time.
When Oesterheld wanted to leave this publishing house, he couldn't take everything he had done with him because the publishers retained the rights. You could invent the story, but once you signed the contract, you had no rights over what you had created. Once I moved to Editorial Frontera, which was founded by Oesterheld and his brother, I started working on other comics, even before El Eternauta. During this period, I worked with Oesterheld on Joe Zonda and Rolo, the adopted Martian, the latter of which appeared in a magazine called Hora Cero. Joe Zonda was a kid, a black-haired boy who had learned all sorts of things by correspondence. He had even learned to be a pilot. In the case of Rolo, his story took place during the time of the alien invasions; he was a schoolteacher and the president of a neighborhood club, he had a group of friends at the local café, and together they would fight against the invaders.
For a while, I drew all three comics: Joe Zonda, Rolo, the adopted Martian, and The Eternaut. They were monthly comics, with eight or ten pages per month for each one. It was a lot of work. After about three years, my time at Editorial Frontera came to an end. It must be acknowledged that Oesterheld had an incomparable talent for writing comic book scripts, but running a publishing house is a different job. He held a university degree in geology and went into partnership with his brother, who was an agricultural engineer. A geologist and an agricultural engineer running a publishing house, imagine how that went: they got screwed and went bankrupt.
MS: Did they sell well and still go bankrupt?
SL: They actually did. Their magazines sold so well that others soon found the income very attractive. There were fake, clandestine editions that the printer churned out in collusion with the distributors. That same printer who benefited during those years would have had earned much more if he had been smarter and let them stay afloat. Among the plans for growth that Héctor and his brother had envisioned, was not higher pay and better working conditions for all of us illustrators, but also the goal of making us partners in the business. It was not to happe because, no matter how successful they were, they were being swindled.
The group I had been working with at Editorial Frontera gradually moved over to work for an English publishing house, thanks to Hugo Pratt, who was already based in Europe. I myself eventually left to work there in the early 1960s because there was a lot of interesting work and it was well paid. First I worked from here for two years—a time of transition during the Frondizi government, with coups and strikes, so it was difficult—and then I moved to Spain.
I chose not to move to England because it seemed to me to be a damp, cold place and I had three young kids... So we went to the Costa del Sol in Spain instead. I would work at home, facing the sea, we had ten months of summer, and the kids could spend time at the beach. After three years, we moved to Rome for a year to tour around Italy. Then we came back to Argentina for a while, and in 1977 we left again, this time in exile: almost two more decades away from my country. During this second departure, I spent ten years in Spain and another ten in Brazil.
Before returning to Argentina, I asked my British employers if it would be fine for me to work remotely from here (Argentina), putting together a team of illustrators, and they accepted. They sent me more work, and I trained more assistants.
RS: And how did you choose these assistants?
SL: At one point there was this Pan-American School of Art of the Twelve Famous Artists. Hugo Pratt and Alberto Breccia taught drawing at this institution. The talented young artists who graduated from there were hired as assistants by me and some of my colleagues at the publishing house.
In the British system (not the American one), the work was anonymous, that is, comic illustrators did not get to sign their work. Two of the largest publishing houses here in Argentina used this system: Abril and Columba. This was because the same comics you did for British magazines were then published elsewhere, in different countries. That's why they weren't interested in us being identified individually.
MS: How did you start drawing comics?
SL: As a kid, I decided to start drawing. I was not an avid reader of comics back then. But my father would take me to the movies to watch the serials, Tarzan movies, war movies... He also took me to the zoo a lot. And I drew those things. I actually read more comics when I got measles and had no choice but to stay in bed.
My father was a journalist. He died when I was eight. I inherited his library and started reading his books. And I would always draw. My mother didn't like the bohemian lifestyle that journalists led, because of my father, and when she saw that I was becoming attracted to drawing, she took a pile of folders with my drawings that my father had kept in one of his bookcases and threw them away. That put a stop to it. I was ten or eleven years old. After that I didn´t draw anything for quite a few years, until I became a teenager. . I didn't even know there were people who made a living out of drawing comics. So I enrolled for a standard degree at the university, but even during those years, I would spend a lot of time drawing. Finally, an opportunity came for me to draw professionally for Editorial Abril.
RS: What did you study at university?
SL: Law. Because I had two cousins, who were about ten years older than me, who were both lawyers. I had started working at the Banco de la Nación. But I didn't graduate as a lawyer because I didn't like it. It was a big drama when I told my parents that I had decided to quit my job at the bank...
MS: And what are you doing now?
SL: Among other things, I'm still working on The Eternaut. When I came back to Argentina, people would ask me about The Eternaut. So we picked up the story again with Pablo Maiztegui, who was my drawing assistant at the time and is now the scriptwriter for the new stories. I met him in Spain because he was friends with my children. I then saw that he had a real talent for drawing.
MS: How did The Eternaut come about?
SL: Well, at the time there was this alien invasion craze, and Oesterheld really liked science fiction. We had already done Rolo, the adopted Martian with him, which was a kind of unconscious prelude to The Eternaut. At that time, there were no science fiction Argentine comics. When Oesterheld started his publishing house (Frontera), he decided that he wanted to create Argentine heroes, and that's exactly what he did. And he talked me into drawing them. So, when the time came to do a serious science fiction story, he wrote The Eternaut.
By the 1970s, Oesterheld had become a supporter of the Montonero guerrillas. So, the second part of El Eternauta, which tells of a struggle against alien invaders, is sort of a metaphor for the situation Oesterheld was involved in back then. In this second part, Juan Salvo goes to the future and the few human survivors that remain continue to fight the aliens, which Oesterheld conceived as a way to portray the fight of the Montonero guerrillas against the military.
RS: What is the current situation with the rights to El Eternauta?
SL: When I left Argentina the second time, I was fleeing with my son, who had also joined the Montoneros. So at the time I did not have the focus to even think about the legal aspects of The Eternaut. I guess the publisher saw an opportunity, a windfall. He must have thought to himself, “It's all mine now.” I had not even informed me of my whereabouts, and he had Oesterheld's widow sign a contract which gave him all the rights. Today, Oesterheld's widow and grandchildren have recovered their rights on the work, and I'm still in legal proceedings over that issue. That publisher had taken advantage of the fact that Oesterheld has been kidnapped in the 1970s and that I had fled into exile. When I returned in 1994, I set everything in motion to recover them, but legal proceedings are taking a long time. (Please note: this interview is from 2012. As of 2025, this was resolved years ago and the descendants of Oesterheld and Solano López have fully recovered their rights over The Eternaut)
RS: How do you see the world of comics in general today?
SL: Well... It's not what it used to be; comics are not read in the same way. In England, they once told me that in the past, teachers would be the foremost critics of comics because, they said, they would stand in the way of children reading actual books. Now, with the rise of visual culture, teachers have become the main advocates of comics because nowadays they represent a good introduction to reading that can then lead children to read other materials.
Solano López: I started drawing professionally five years before El Eternauta came out. I've been working professionally for fifty-five years now, because let's not forget that next year will mark the fiftieth anniversary of El Eternauta's first publication.
MS: And how old were you when you started working professionally?
SL: By the standards of the time, I started working late. I was twenty-three.
At Misterix, in Abril, I worked on Bull Rocket with Oesterheld. At that time,
Oesterheld was gaining fame for the Sargento Kirk comic strip drawn by Hugo Pratt. Oesterheld was also a kind of guide and director, behind the scenes, at the magazine Más Allá, which was a monthly publication, not of comics, but of science fiction. That's where he published the first episodes of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. And he also included a science fiction story from time to time.
When Oesterheld wanted to leave this publishing house, he couldn't take everything he had done with him because the publishers retained the rights. You could invent the story, but once you signed the contract, you had no rights over what you had created. Once I moved to Editorial Frontera, which was founded by Oesterheld and his brother, I started working on other comics, even before El Eternauta. During this period, I worked with Oesterheld on Joe Zonda and Rolo, the adopted Martian, the latter of which appeared in a magazine called Hora Cero. Joe Zonda was a kid, a black-haired boy who had learned all sorts of things by correspondence. He had even learned to be a pilot. In the case of Rolo, his story took place during the time of the alien invasions; he was a schoolteacher and the president of a neighborhood club, he had a group of friends at the local café, and together they would fight against the invaders.
For a while, I drew all three comics: Joe Zonda, Rolo, the adopted Martian, and The Eternaut. They were monthly comics, with eight or ten pages per month for each one. It was a lot of work. After about three years, my time at Editorial Frontera came to an end. It must be acknowledged that Oesterheld had an incomparable talent for writing comic book scripts, but running a publishing house is a different job. He held a university degree in geology and went into partnership with his brother, who was an agricultural engineer. A geologist and an agricultural engineer running a publishing house, imagine how that went: they got screwed and went bankrupt.
MS: Did they sell well and still go bankrupt?
SL: They actually did. Their magazines sold so well that others soon found the income very attractive. There were fake, clandestine editions that the printer churned out in collusion with the distributors. That same printer who benefited during those years would have had earned much more if he had been smarter and let them stay afloat. Among the plans for growth that Héctor and his brother had envisioned, was not higher pay and better working conditions for all of us illustrators, but also the goal of making us partners in the business. It was not to happe because, no matter how successful they were, they were being swindled.
The group I had been working with at Editorial Frontera gradually moved over to work for an English publishing house, thanks to Hugo Pratt, who was already based in Europe. I myself eventually left to work there in the early 1960s because there was a lot of interesting work and it was well paid. First I worked from here for two years—a time of transition during the Frondizi government, with coups and strikes, so it was difficult—and then I moved to Spain.
I chose not to move to England because it seemed to me to be a damp, cold place and I had three young kids... So we went to the Costa del Sol in Spain instead. I would work at home, facing the sea, we had ten months of summer, and the kids could spend time at the beach. After three years, we moved to Rome for a year to tour around Italy. Then we came back to Argentina for a while, and in 1977 we left again, this time in exile: almost two more decades away from my country. During this second departure, I spent ten years in Spain and another ten in Brazil.
Before returning to Argentina, I asked my British employers if it would be fine for me to work remotely from here (Argentina), putting together a team of illustrators, and they accepted. They sent me more work, and I trained more assistants.
RS: And how did you choose these assistants?
SL: At one point there was this Pan-American School of Art of the Twelve Famous Artists. Hugo Pratt and Alberto Breccia taught drawing at this institution. The talented young artists who graduated from there were hired as assistants by me and some of my colleagues at the publishing house.
In the British system (not the American one), the work was anonymous, that is, comic illustrators did not get to sign their work. Two of the largest publishing houses here in Argentina used this system: Abril and Columba. This was because the same comics you did for British magazines were then published elsewhere, in different countries. That's why they weren't interested in us being identified individually.
MS: How did you start drawing comics?
SL: As a kid, I decided to start drawing. I was not an avid reader of comics back then. But my father would take me to the movies to watch the serials, Tarzan movies, war movies... He also took me to the zoo a lot. And I drew those things. I actually read more comics when I got measles and had no choice but to stay in bed.
My father was a journalist. He died when I was eight. I inherited his library and started reading his books. And I would always draw. My mother didn't like the bohemian lifestyle that journalists led, because of my father, and when she saw that I was becoming attracted to drawing, she took a pile of folders with my drawings that my father had kept in one of his bookcases and threw them away. That put a stop to it. I was ten or eleven years old. After that I didn´t draw anything for quite a few years, until I became a teenager. . I didn't even know there were people who made a living out of drawing comics. So I enrolled for a standard degree at the university, but even during those years, I would spend a lot of time drawing. Finally, an opportunity came for me to draw professionally for Editorial Abril.
RS: What did you study at university?
SL: Law. Because I had two cousins, who were about ten years older than me, who were both lawyers. I had started working at the Banco de la Nación. But I didn't graduate as a lawyer because I didn't like it. It was a big drama when I told my parents that I had decided to quit my job at the bank...
MS: And what are you doing now?
SL: Among other things, I'm still working on The Eternaut. When I came back to Argentina, people would ask me about The Eternaut. So we picked up the story again with Pablo Maiztegui, who was my drawing assistant at the time and is now the scriptwriter for the new stories. I met him in Spain because he was friends with my children. I then saw that he had a real talent for drawing.
MS: How did The Eternaut come about?
SL: Well, at the time there was this alien invasion craze, and Oesterheld really liked science fiction. We had already done Rolo, the adopted Martian with him, which was a kind of unconscious prelude to The Eternaut. At that time, there were no science fiction Argentine comics. When Oesterheld started his publishing house (Frontera), he decided that he wanted to create Argentine heroes, and that's exactly what he did. And he talked me into drawing them. So, when the time came to do a serious science fiction story, he wrote The Eternaut.
By the 1970s, Oesterheld had become a supporter of the Montonero guerrillas. So, the second part of El Eternauta, which tells of a struggle against alien invaders, is sort of a metaphor for the situation Oesterheld was involved in back then. In this second part, Juan Salvo goes to the future and the few human survivors that remain continue to fight the aliens, which Oesterheld conceived as a way to portray the fight of the Montonero guerrillas against the military.
RS: What is the current situation with the rights to El Eternauta?
SL: When I left Argentina the second time, I was fleeing with my son, who had also joined the Montoneros. So at the time I did not have the focus to even think about the legal aspects of The Eternaut. I guess the publisher saw an opportunity, a windfall. He must have thought to himself, “It's all mine now.” I had not even informed me of my whereabouts, and he had Oesterheld's widow sign a contract which gave him all the rights. Today, Oesterheld's widow and grandchildren have recovered their rights on the work, and I'm still in legal proceedings over that issue. That publisher had taken advantage of the fact that Oesterheld has been kidnapped in the 1970s and that I had fled into exile. When I returned in 1994, I set everything in motion to recover them, but legal proceedings are taking a long time. (Please note: this interview is from 2012. As of 2025, this was resolved years ago and the descendants of Oesterheld and Solano López have fully recovered their rights over The Eternaut)
RS: How do you see the world of comics in general today?
SL: Well... It's not what it used to be; comics are not read in the same way. In England, they once told me that in the past, teachers would be the foremost critics of comics because, they said, they would stand in the way of children reading actual books. Now, with the rise of visual culture, teachers have become the main advocates of comics because nowadays they represent a good introduction to reading that can then lead children to read other materials.