About Skorpio

Skorpio

Skorpio was a comics magazine first published in Buenos Aires in July 1974, directed by Alfredo Scutti and published until 1996 by Ediciones Record. Based in Buenos Aires, in the Buenos Aires (CABA) region of Argentina, it was subtitled 'El mundo de la gran historieta' — the world of the great comic — and it revived the golden-age adventure tradition for a new generation, publishing Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltés and Oesterheld and Solano López's El Eternauta II. Its Argentine edition closed in 1996, while an Italian edition launched in 1977 continued the title abroad.

Launch by Ediciones Record

Skorpio was launched in July 1974 by Ediciones Récord, with Alfredo Scutti as editorial director and the artist Juan Zanotto serving as artistic supervisor. The seed record gives July 1974 as its first publication and Scutti as its director. The magazine took its name from a character created by writer Eugenio Zappietro, under the pen name Ray Collins, and artist Ernesto García Seijas — a naming choice that announced its allegiance to the classic Argentine adventure historieta, in which a strong title character embodied a whole magazine.

The timing was deliberate. By 1974 the great Buenos Aires houses of the golden age were weakening, and the generation of readers raised on El Tony, Hora Cero and Misterix was adult. Skorpio offered that readership a weekly anthology comic magazine of ambition: longer, more demanding stories, presented as a revival of the grand tradition its subtitle proclaimed.

Artistic Freedom as an Editorial Policy

Histories of Skorpio emphasise one founding decision above all: because of the artistic freedom it granted, the magazine attracted all the major Argentine comic artists of the time. In a commercial industry built on house styles and strict schedules, Récord's willingness to let writers and artists work in their own manner was a competitive strategy, and it worked immediately. The magazine had immediate success.

That freedom shaped Skorpio's identity for twenty-two years. Its pages mixed historical adventure, science fiction, westerns and war stories with artwork that ranged from classic clarity to experimental darkness, and its anthology form let established masters appear beside younger creators. It became, in effect, the professional home of Argentine comics' post-golden-age generation.

Series That Defined the Magazine

The series introduced in Skorpio became a roll of honour of Argentine comics. They included Bárbara, by Ricardo Barreiro and Juan Zanotto; Yor the Hunter, by Zappietro and Zanotto; and Alvar Mayor, by Carlos Trillo and Enrique Breccia. The magazine also published, among much else, the work associated with its seed-record highlights: Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltés, the wandering sailor whose sophisticated adventures had roots in Pratt's Argentine years, and El Eternauta II, the sequel by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Francisco Solano López.

Skorpio also republished Argentine classic comics such as Mort Cinder, Sergeant Kirk and El Eternauta itself, placing the heritage of the golden age in the same magazine as its newest work. A standalone supplement edition of the original El Eternauta, published by Ediciones Récord as a supplement of Skorpio in 1976–1977 in eleven issues, gave the 1957 classic its first independent printing — in the opening years of Argentina's military dictatorship, when Oesterheld's story of invasion and collective resistance carried an unmistakable contemporary weight.

El Eternauta II and the Dictatorship Years

No episode in Skorpio's history carries more historical gravity than El Eternauta II. Oesterheld wrote the sequel with Solano López in the mid-1970s as Argentina descended into state terror; by the time he completed it he had joined the Montoneros, was writing in hiding, and in 1977 he was kidnapped and disappeared by the military regime, which also murdered his four daughters. The sequel's publication in Récord's orbit, and the Skorpio supplement's reissue of the original saga in 1976–1977, made the magazine a custodian of the most politically charged work in Argentine comics at the moment of its greatest danger.

Skorpio itself survived the dictatorship years of 1976–1983 as a commercial adventure magazine, a survival that required the care typical of Argentine publishing in that period. Its adventure and science-fiction genres could carry meanings that direct commentary could not, and its classic reprints kept the pre-dictatorship tradition of the historieta in circulation for younger readers.

An Argentine Magazine in Italy

Skorpio's history has a second, international chapter. An Italian version of the magazine was launched in Italy in 1977 by Lancio Editore, initially devoted almost entirely to Argentine productions. The Italian Skorpio was published weekly from March 1977 and gradually, from the early 1980s, included more Italian and French-Belgian comics and, more rarely, American material. Its series over the years included Cybersix, Gilgamesh, Alvar Mayor, the namesake Skorpio, Nippur de Lagash and Dago — a list that shows how thoroughly Argentine work supplied Italian popular comics in this period.

For this directory, the relevant publication is the Argentine original: published in Buenos Aires from 1974 to 1996. The Italian edition's long independent life — it continued under successor publishers for decades after the Argentine magazine closed — is noted here because it forms part of Skorpio's legacy, but it was a separate publication from the Buenos Aires magazine profiled in this entry.

Place Among Argentine Magazines

Skorpio occupied a distinctive position. It was not a golden-age magazine — it was a conscious revival of the golden age, founded two decades after Hora Cero Semanal, by editors and artists who understood exactly what tradition they were restoring. Where Editorial Columba's titles were a vertically integrated house system, Skorpio was an editor's magazine: Scutti's direction, Zanotto's artistic supervision and Récord's commitment to creator freedom defined its character.

Its weekly anthology form, its mixture of new series and canonical reprints, and its roster — Barreiro, Trillo, Enrique Breccia, Zanotto, Zappietro, García Seijas and their peers — made it the bridge between the golden age and the modern Argentine historieta that Fierro would champion a decade later.

Later Years

Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, Skorpio continued as a weekly presence in Buenos Aires kiosks while the economics of Argentine comics deteriorated around it: hyperinflation at the end of the 1980s, the flood of imported editions in the 1990s, and the migration of serious comics reading toward specialised shops and album formats all pressed on a weekly anthology sold for the general market. A June 1994 cover, featuring La Saga del Sur by Arturo del Castillo and Ricardo Barreiro, shows the magazine still commissioning work from masters of the classic tradition in its final years.

The magazine's scholarly afterlife began early: Martín Greco's detailed index study of Skorpio, and its treatment in journals such as CuCo, Cuadernos de Cómic — both cited in the seed record — document its contents issue by issue, a level of documentation few Argentine popular magazines have received.

Closure

Skorpio closed in Argentina in 1996, after twenty-two years of publication. Ediciones Récord's Buenos Aires magazine ended, while the Italian edition continued independently under its own publishers. The closure coincided with the general collapse of the Argentine weekly comics magazine: Editorial Columba, Skorpio's great counterpart, survived only five years longer, and no Buenos Aires publisher replaced the weekly anthology as a mass form.

Legacy

Skorpio's legacy is double. In Argentina, it preserved and renewed the great adventure tradition — launching Bárbara, Yor the Hunter and Alvar Mayor, republishing Mort Cinder, Sergeant Kirk and El Eternauta, and giving the country's major artists a freedom they found nowhere else. Abroad, through its Italian edition, it carried Argentine comics to a European mass readership for a generation.

For a directory of Argentine magazines, Skorpio is the essential title of the 1970s: the Buenos Aires weekly, directed by Alfredo Scutti for Ediciones Record from July 1974 to 1996, that proved the gran historieta still had a public — and still had creators worthy of it — long after the golden age was declared over.

Skorpio's influence can also be traced in the professional formation of its readers. Many of the Argentine creators who emerged in the 1980s and 1990s had grown up reading Skorpio's mixture of new adventure series and golden-age reprints, and they inherited from it a sense of the historieta as a complete popular art with its own canon. By keeping Mort Cinder, Sergeant Kirk and El Eternauta in circulation beside new work, the magazine taught that canon to a generation that might otherwise have lost contact with it, and that educational role is now counted among its principal contributions.