Evening was falling over Buenos Aires, and the neighborhood was taking on that special sunset hue, so typical of twilights in certain comics. And that's where we were headed— on our way to the home of one of the great masters of the global comic strip tradition: the illustrator Francisco Solano López, co-creator of The Eternaut together with Héctor Oesterheld.

Solano López: I began working professionally five years before The Eternaut came out. I’ve now been working professionally for fifty-five years, since let’s not forget that next year The Eternaut turns fifty years old.

MS: How old were you when you started working professionally?

SL: By the standards of the time, I started late. I was twenty-three.

I worked on Bull Rocket with Oesterheld at Misterix, from Editorial Abril. At that time, Oesterheld was gaining fame with the comic Sargento Kirk, illustrated by Hugo Pratt. Oesterheld was also a kind of guide and behind-the-scenes director of Más Allá, a monthly magazine—not a comic, but a science fiction publication. That’s where Oesterheld published the first episodes of The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. He also slipped in the occasional science fiction short story of his own.

When Oesterheld wanted to break away from that publisher, he couldn’t take his work with him because the publishers retained the rights—you could invent the story, but once you signed the contract, you no longer had any rights over what you’d created. When I moved to Editorial Frontera—the publishing house Oesterheld founded with his brother—I started working on other comics, even before The Eternaut. At that time, I did Joe Zonda and Rolo, the Adopted Martian, both with Oesterheld. The latter was published in a magazine called Hora Cero. Joe Zonda was about a kid from the slums who had learned everything by correspondence—even how to be a pilot. Rolo was set among an alien invasion; he was a schoolteacher and the president of the local club, and he and his friends from the neighborhood café fought against the invaders.

“For a while I was doing all three comics: Joe Zonda, Rolo, the Adopted Martian, and The Eternaut. They were monthly comics, with eight or ten pages of each released per month. It was a lot of work. After about three years, my time with Editorial Frontera ended. One has to admit that Oesterheld had unparalleled talent for writing comic scripts, but running a publishing house is a different profession. His university degree was in geology, and he partnered with his brother, an agricultural engineer. A geologist and an agricultural engineer running a publishing house—you can imagine how that turned out: they got swindled and went bankrupt.

MS: So the comics sold well, and still they went broke?

SL: They sold so well that not much of it actually went through their books. There were fake, underground print runs made by the printer in collusion with the distributors. That same printer who profited off them during those years could’ve had a lot more work if he’d let them grow. As part of the plans Héctor and his brother had, they not only promised better working conditions but also to make us partners. That never happened, because even with all their success, they were being robbed blind.

The group I worked with at Editorial Frontera slowly started moving over to a British publisher, thanks to Hugo Pratt, who was already living in Europe. Eventually, in the early ’60s, I went there myself, since there was interesting work that paid well. At first, I worked from here for two years—during the transitional period of the Frondizi government, coups, strikes—it was a difficult time. Then I moved to Spain.

I didn’t go to England because it seemed cold and damp, and I had three small kids. We went to the Costa del Sol in Spain. I worked from home in front of the sea—ten months of summer—the kids could go to the beach. After three years, we spent a year in Rome to get to know Italy. Then we came back, and in ’77 we went into exile—almost two decades away from the country. On that second departure, I spent ten years in Spain and another ten in Brazil.

Before coming back, I asked the British publishers if I could work from here by assembling a team, and as they sent me more work, I brought on more assistants.

RS: How did you choose these assistants?

SL: At one point there was the Panamerican School of Art of the Twelve Famous Artists. I didn’t get in, since I was new. But Hugo Pratt and Alberto Breccia taught drawing there. That’s where the guys with talent came from—the ones my colleagues and I would hire as assistants.

In the British system (not the American), the work was anonymous—it came out without signatures. And this system was also used by two major publishers here: Abril and Columba. The same comics you made for the British would then appear everywhere, in different countries. That’s why they didn’t want us to be identified.

MS: How did you start drawing comics?

SL: I started drawing when I was a kid. I didn’t read many comics. My father used to take me to the movies to see serials, Tarzan films, war movies... He also took me to the zoo a lot. And I would draw those things. I read comics mostly when I got measles and had to stay in bed.

My father was a journalist. He died when I was eight. His library was left behind, and I started reading books. And I always kept drawing. My mother didn’t really like the bohemian life journalists led—because of my father—and when she saw I liked drawing, she took a pile of folders my father had stored on a bookshelf and threw them out. That was a huge blow for me—I must’ve been ten or eleven. For about three or four years, until I hit adolescence, I stopped drawing. I didn’t even know there were people who made a living drawing comics. Even in university, I would spend my time drawing during class. Eventually, I got the chance to draw for Editorial Abril.

RS: What were you studying in university?

SL: Law. Because I had two first cousins, ten years older than me, who were lawyers. I had started working at the Banco de la Nación. But I never finished law school—I didn’t like it. The big drama came when I said I was quitting the bank...

MS: And what are you doing now?

SL: Among other things, I’m still working on *The Eternaut*. When I came back, people kept asking me about it. So we picked it up again with Pablo Maiztegui, who had been my drawing assistant and is now the current scriptwriter. I met him in Spain—he’s a friend of my kids—and I saw he had a real knack for drawing.

MS: How did The Eternaut come to be?

SL: At the time, there was this craze for stories about invaders, and Oesterheld really liked science fiction. We had already done Rolo, the Adoptive Martian together—a kind of unconscious trial run. Back then, there wasn’t really any sci-fi in Argentine comics. When Oesterheld started his own publishing house, he wanted to create Argentine heroes—and that’s what he did. And he picked me for that. When the time came to do real science fiction, he wrote The Eternaut.

When the seventies came, Oesterheld had become a supporter of the Montoneros. So, in the second part of The Eternaut, the story turned into a kind of metaphor for the struggle against alien invaders. Juan Salvo, in this second part, goes to the future, and those who stay behind keep fighting the extraterrestrial invaders—the equivalent of the Montoneros fighting against the oppressors.

RS: What’s the situation with the rights to The Eternaut?

SL: When I left the country a second time—fleeing with my son, who had gotten involved with the Montoneros—I didn’t worry about the legal aspects of The Eternaut. So the publisher said, "All mine." He didn’t even know where I was and got Oesterheld’s widow to sign over the rights. He took everything. Today, Oesterheld’s widow and grandchildren have reclaimed the rights, but I’m still in the middle of legal proceedings about that. That publisher took advantage of the fact that Oesterheld was being persecuted in the ’70s and I was in exile to steal the rights. When I came back in 1994, I began working to recover them, but these lawsuits take forever.

RS: How do you see the comic book world today?

SL: Well… It’s not what it used to be. It’s not consumed the same way. Look—in England, they used to say that teachers were the biggest critics of comics because they believed comics discouraged kids from reading. But now, with visual culture so dominant, teachers have become comics’ greatest allies, because they’re a good pathway to other forms of reading.

Fuente: Revista El Abasto.