The Eternaut speaks to our uneasy times – that's why this cult comic has become a global Netflix hit

The Guardian

6 hours ago

Aliens almost always invade New York, with a secondary preference for rural America. They're typically vanquished by a collaboration of cowboy sacrifice and eloquent leaders who restore order under the stars and stripes. The Eternaut, Netflix's new sci-fi series that became a global hit this month, breaks this mould: giant alien bugs controlled by an unseen extraterrestrial overlord take over Buenos Aires. Victory always seems far away – it's not clear that humanity will triumph.
Like the 1950s comic it's based on, the series does not merely transpose alien invasion tropes on a new geography: it rewrites them. The Eternaut isn't about a lone hero who saves the day – it's a story about how ordinary Argentinians face existential threat. There is no single saviour in the story, according to the author, Héctor Germán Oesterheld: 'The true hero of The Eternaut is a collective hero, a human group. It thus reflects, though without previous intent, my intimate belief: the only valid hero is the hero 'in group', never the individual hero, the hero alone.' The series' tagline adopts this ethos: Nadie se salva solo – nobody is saved alone.
The premise is strange even by sci-fi standards. The plot of the comic features a lethal snowfall, robot alien pawns, a time machine and a never-seen overlord species known only as Them. And yet it has struck a global chord: the Netflix adaptation captured 10.8m views worldwide in its first week. It made the top 10 in 87 countries. And it has not left the global non-English top 10 since its release. Publishers are rushing to reissue an out-of-print English translation of the book upon which it is based.
In Argentina, the original comic has long been a cult classic. Oesterheld's decision to anchor the story in the streets of Buenos Aires allowed the work, illustrated by Francisco Solano López, to resonate deeply. It reflects the fears and dreams of mid-century Argentina shaped by the new social mobility led by organised labour and public universities. It is permeated by the belief that scientific progress could lift people and country by their bootstraps.
If the original gave workers reading the comic on their daily commute a dose of optimism, the new series reflects a far more battered society. This generational shift is visible in Juan Salvo, the eponymous eternaut. In the 1957-59 version he was a young family man, the prosperous owner of a small manufacturing business, married to a beautiful housewife and the doting father of a cherubic daughter. In 2025 Salvo is in his 60s, a war veteran with PTSD, divorced, and the father of an independent teenager who is likely a sleeper agent for Them.
The shift matters. The Argentina reflected in this mirror is older; it's scarred and haunted by decades of democratic breakdowns, dictatorship, hyperinflation and economic collapse.
But it is also a story of resilience. As the local saying goes: Estamos atados con alambre – we're holding it together with wire – celebrating an ability to improvise with whatever material is at hand. In The Eternaut, 'we read a celebratory version of our customs and social organisation, in an artistic format – the comic – that shares some of the conventions of both 'highbrow' art and popular and mass art,' writes literary scholar Soledad Quereilhac. The series maintains, and even elevates, this celebration of argentinidad, or being Argentinian – from humour and music to sociability and card games.
Buenos Aires is not just a backdrop, it's a protagonist. The characters fight on streets that remain central to our daily commutes and political battles. These arteries form a line of continuity in a text that has constantly acquired new interpretations as it travels through time, just like its protagonist. That successive generations have found new meaning in The Eternaut, despite vastly different circumstances, is part of what makes the text a classic, according to cultural critic Marcelo Figueras.
And the mirror The Eternaut holds up to Argentinian society is far broader than just the story within the comic. When books are banned, they often take on new symbolic power. The Little Prince, a book partly inspired by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's time in Argentina, was banned by the 1976-83 dictatorship, giving it a weight beyond the somewhat naive tale. The Eternaut is similarly charged – Oesterheld, his four daughters, sons-in-law and two unborn grandchildren were among the 30,000 'disappeared' in the dictatorship. The faces of Oesterheld and his daughters have been pasted on Netflix posters lining Buenos Aires' streets – it is a temporally jarring moment worthy of the comic itself. Like the protagonist Salvo, the author – whose remains have never been recovered – is lost in time.
And yet the new adaptation makes no mention of dictatorship. For some, this omission may read as historical erasure. But it may also be deliberate – a more general interpretation of collective trauma that sidesteps Argentina's polarised culture wars in which the politics of memory are dismissed as ideological excess or, more recently, as 'woke' distortions by the president, Javier Milei.
Or perhaps the absence is the statement. The Eternaut's ideology was always coded in metaphor. Snow falls silently lethal. Alien overlords pull strings. Some read it as a veiled indictment of the military bombing of civilians and the later coup that ousted Juan Perón in 1955. In portraying a dignified, resourceful working class – Peronist by implication – it defied an era in which even saying Perón's name was forbidden.
In the series, that appreciative perspective has shifted to Argentina's besieged middle class, once the pillar of the country's exceptionalism, now eroded by inflation and austerity. This too is tacitly political. In Milei's Argentina, where public universities are defunded, cultural institutions gutted and social programmes under attack, the show's message of collective survival, of interclass solidarity, is its own quiet rebellion. Though filmed before Milei's election, its ethos cuts against the libertarian gospel of radical individualism. Even the tagline – Nobody is saved alone – feels like resistance. The symbolism has been adopted by scientists protesting against austerity budget cuts who recently demonstrated against 'scienticide' wearing Eternaut-style gas masks.
Salvation, hinted at in Salvo's very name, is the story's elusive goal. The comic ends ambiguously, in a temporal loop. Salvo is reunited with his family, but the aliens are not defeated. There is no cathartic American-style victory. Instead, another alien race touched by Salvo's struggle offers him cold comfort: humanity's fruitless resistance is inspiration for intergalactic intelligent species fighting against Them.
It's not a happy ending. But it's not hopeless. The Eternaut carries on, buoyed up by human connection, friendship and stubborn resistance. Proudly made in Argentina.
Jordana Timerman is a journalist based in Buenos Aires. She edits the Latin America Daily Briefing