Ernie Pike

Ernie Pike
Ernie Pike, drawn by Alberto Breccia.
Publication information
Publisher	Editorial Frontera
First appearance	Hora Cero #1 (May 1957)
Created by	Héctor Germán Oesterheld, Hugo Pratt

Ernie Pike is a comics series written by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and originally drawn by Hugo Pratt, starring a World War II and Korean War reporter. It was first published in the magazine "Hora Cero" in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1957. The reporter, loosely based on the real reporter Ernie Pyle, acts as a narrator of stories, without being directly involved in them. Such stories do not narrate real battles or exploits of noteworthy military people, being instead tragic stories of unknown soldiers, made up by the author. Oesterheld worked again with the character during the time of the Vietnam War, and Ricardo Barreiro used it for a brief story about the Falklands War.

The comic is set during World War II, and the protagonist - Ernie Pike - is the narrator, without playing an active role in the stories. Unlike genre standards, the comic does not show any battles, and neither describes the war between Allies and Nazis as a conflict between good and evil. Instead, it centers on tragic events involving soldiers of both sides. Generally, those tragedies are misunderstandings that end up badly: characters who go mad, kill their own friends by friendly fire or because they believe them to be traitors, attempt to get killed in a specific way to avoid a more gruesome death, or who must mercy-kill badly hurt comrades, to cite several examples. Oesterheld, thus, utilizes war comics to reflect his personal dislike of war itself. The character never formulates positive or negative opinions about the allies, the nazis or specific events of the war, but about the morality of the soldiers in the anecdotes narrated. The stories take place at multiple locations of World War II, such as the European Theatre, the South Pacific ocean, the North African Campaign and the Eastern Front.