About Hora Cero Semanal

Hora Cero Semanal

Hora Cero Semanal was a weekly comics magazine first published in Buenos Aires on 4 September 1957 by Editorial Frontera, the publishing house of writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld. Based in Buenos Aires, in the Buenos Aires (CABA) region of Argentina, it serialised El Eternauta by Oesterheld and Francisco Solano López, plus Ernie Pike and Sargento Kirk, and it ended with issue 116 on 18 November 1959. Its launch date is now Argentina's Comics Day.

Editorial Frontera: A Writer's Publishing House

Hora Cero Semanal was the weekly supplement of a remarkable venture. Héctor Germán Oesterheld, already one of Argentina's most popular comics writers for his Bull Rocket and Sergeant Kirk in the Abril publisher's Misterix, founded Editorial Frontera with his brother Jorge in 1957, taking Sergeant Kirk with him, together with its artist Hugo Pratt, by agreement with Abril's owner Cesare Civita. The anthologies Frontera and Hora Cero appeared in April and May 1957 respectively, Oesterheld writing most of the scripts himself under his own name and pseudonyms, his brother writing the rest.

The anthologies succeeded, and Frontera expanded the family: Hora Cero Extra, Frontera Extra and, on 4 September 1957, the weekly Hora Cero Semanal — listed in publisher histories as the Suplemento Semanal Hora Cero. A writer owning his own publishing house was a rarity in the commercial comics industry, and it gave the magazine its character: Hora Cero Semanal was edited around scripts, around stories, to a degree no artist-led or purely commercial title matched.

El Eternauta

On 4 September 1957, in Hora Cero Semanal, began the serialisation of El Eternauta, written by Oesterheld and drawn by Francisco Solano López. It ran in the magazine until 1959, in some 350 pages, and it became the foundational classic of Argentine comics. Its story — a deadly snowfall over Buenos Aires that is the prelude to an alien invasion, and a group of ordinary citizens, led by Juan Salvo, who survive by improvised protective suits and collective resistance — inverted the lone-hero conventions of adventure comics. Its hero was a group; its setting was recognisably Buenos Aires; its theme was solidarity under invasion.

The story's afterlife exceeded anything its makers could have expected in 1957. Oesterheld remade it in 1969 with Alberto Breccia in a more overtly political tone, wrote a sequel in the 1970s, and was disappeared by the military dictatorship in 1977, a fate that sealed El Eternauta's standing as a work of artistic and political martyrdom as well as of art. It has been translated internationally, studied continuously, and adapted as a Netflix television miniseries premiered on 30 April 2025, starring Ricardo Darín. All of that began in the pages of this Buenos Aires weekly.

Ernie Pike, Sargento Kirk and Randall

El Eternauta did not carry the magazine alone. Hora Cero Semanal was an anthology of the Oesterheld school at its peak. Ernie Pike, Oesterheld's war series with Hugo Pratt, presented a war correspondent's humanistic, anti-war chronicles of the Second World War — stories that refused glory and concentrated on the ordinary soldier's experience. Sargento Kirk, the western series Oesterheld had brought from Misterix, continued its exploration of frontier myths with Pratt. Randall the Killer, Oesterheld's western with the Chilean artist Arturo del Castillo, was among the magazine's other signature series, and series such as Sherlock Time, by Oesterheld and Alberto Breccia, and the science-fiction and adventure work of Solano López filled out its pages.

Several of these series soon became successful enough to sustain their own runs. A weekly anthology that could generate Ernie Pike, Ticonderoga and El Eternauta within two years has a claim to be the most creatively fertile magazine in Argentine publishing history.

The Oesterheld School

Historians speak of an Oesterheld school because Hora Cero Semanal embodied a method: scripts of literary quality, research and moral seriousness inside popular genres, collaboration with artists of the first rank — Pratt, Breccia, Solano López, del Castillo — and a belief that the comics reader deserved stories as serious as any in prose fiction. Oesterheld wrote the greater part of the scripts in the Frontera magazines himself, and the coherence of the weekly came from that single, tireless hand.

The magazine also stood at a crossroads of Argentine art. The Italian artists of the post-war Venice Group circle in Buenos Aires, and Argentine masters considered their honorary peers, supplied the industry around it; Frontera concentrated their talents in one house for three extraordinary years.

A Short Life: 116 Issues

Hora Cero Semanal's life was brief and is precisely documented at its ends: launched 4 September 1957, it ended with issue 116 on 18 November 1959. Brevity was the price of its model. Frontera decayed in 1959 as most of its artists were hired to work in Europe — Pratt and his peers were drawn to the better-paying European market — and the publishing house fell into bankruptcy in 1959. Its magazines were taken by the publisher Emilio Ramírez to pay debts, and Frontera titles continued in diminished form until 1963, but Hora Cero Semanal itself, the weekly of the great years, ended in November 1959.

That short run — barely twenty-six months — produced a disproportionate share of the Argentine comics canon. Few magazines anywhere have matched its ratio of classic series to total issues.

Argentina's Comics Day

The seed record notes a distinction no other magazine in this directory carries: Hora Cero Semanal's launch date is now Argentina's Comics Day. The Día de la Historieta is celebrated on 4 September, the anniversary of the weekly's first issue and of the first appearance of El Eternauta. The choice by Argentina's comics community of that date as the national day of the medium is the formal recognition of the magazine's foundational place: Argentine comics date their modern identity from the morning this Buenos Aires weekly first appeared.

Readers of the Fifties

Hora Cero Semanal was read in a Buenos Aires of radio, cinema and kiosk magazines, by a public that bought comics weekly in large numbers and discussed them as it discussed football and film. Its oblong format and weekly serialisation suited that culture: each issue advanced several beloved stories at once, and a reader of Hora Cero Semanal followed not a single hero but an entire fictional world renewed every seven days. The weekly's tens of thousands of readers made El Eternauta a popular phenomenon from its first year, long before it was a classic.

Afterlife and Reprints

The magazine's contents refused to die with it. El Eternauta was reprinted in book form, remade in 1969, given a sequel in the 1970s, reissued in a standalone Skorpio supplement edition in 1976–1977, and carried into world literature in translation. Ernie Pike and Sargento Kirk were collected internationally as Pratt's reputation grew into that of a world master. The Frontera magazines themselves became collectors' objects, and 4 September became a national celebration. Hora Cero Semanal is consequently one of the most documented Argentine magazines of its century, its short run indexed and studied in detail.

Legacy

Hora Cero Semanal's legacy is foundational in the strictest sense: it founded the modern Argentine historieta's claim to seriousness. In 116 issues it published the first El Eternauta, sustained Ernie Pike and Sargento Kirk, and demonstrated that a writer-led publishing house could produce, in Buenos Aires, comics that the world would still read seventy years later.

For a directory of Argentine magazines, it is an indispensable entry: a weekly published by Editorial Frontera from 4 September 1957 to 18 November 1959, closed when its publisher collapsed, and honoured ever since in the date Argentina chose for its Comics Day.

Hora Cero Semanal also changed who could be a hero in Argentine popular fiction. Juan Salvo was no superman: he was a Buenos Aires householder whose survival depended on his neighbours, his friends and his willingness to share danger rather than escape it. That conception of the collective hero, first serialised in this weekly in 1957, passed into Argentine culture far beyond comics, and it is regularly cited when El Eternauta is discussed in schools, museums and political debate. The magazine that carried it for 116 issues therefore stands behind one of the most influential ideas in modern Argentine storytelling.