The eternal traveller in a shifting horizon: a comparative analysis of El Eternauta from comic to screen

Abstract

This article presents a comparative analysis of Héctor Germán Oesterheld’s graphic novel El Eternauta (1957–1959) and its 2025 Netflix adaptation. Grounded in comics studies, this research explores how the original work utilises the specific mechanics of sequential art – particularly panel architecture, focalisation, and visual braiding – to construct a ‘pre-traumatic’ narrative of collective resistance. We then examine how the 2025 adaptation translates these medium-specific properties into an audiovisual spectacle, a process that fundamentally alters the audience’s implication in the narrative. By shifting from the comic’s use of ‘masked’ archetypes to a psychologically individuated, star-led protagonist, the television series operates as a ‘post-memory’ text that re-reads the original through the lens of historical trauma and contemporary digital anxieties. This analysis demonstrates that the myth’s enduring power lies not in static preservation, but in its capacity for transmedial and hermeneutic reinterpretation.