Poster for El Eternauta

I was bored so I decided to try my hand at an Illustrator Project that was more interesting. Here is a poster for the Argentine graphic novel El Eternauta by Hector G. Oesterheld and Francisco Lopez.

El Eternauta is a classic comic tale of aliens, robots, melodrama, flying saucers, ray guns, giant cockroaches, and zombies; all of which was the pulp of 50s and 60s comics. Having lived in Buenos Aires, I appreciate Oesterheld giving Argentina a voice in action comics. The book is well-paced (as long as you can read Castellano) and is highly entertaining for its "vintage" quality.

Here I took a bunch of scans from my personal copy of the book, arranged them into layers and messed around with transparency. The figure in the foreground is from the iconic scene where the main protagonist, Juan Salvo, steps out into a flurry of radioactive snow armed with a hunting rifle. In popular culture, the image has come to represent the ordinary man's honorable struggle against the forces of evil that surround him. The image is also a popular subject for graffiti artists in Buenos Aires.

The color of Juan Salvo's figure is based on the dark blue color of Salvo's suit on the "official" 50th anniversary edition of El Eternauta. It seems to be the "canonical" suit color, though I have seen it colored orange like a haz-mat suit.

Check out El Eternauta on Amazon here:
http://www.amazon.com/El-Eternauta-1957-2007-50-x303/dp/9879085264/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1379546009&sr=8-3&keywords=el+eternauta

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