Now in its sixth edition, Jesi’s annual celebration of international comics returns with a new exhibition dedicated to two towering figures of the ninth art. The 2026 edition, “A Tale from 2053 – The Universal Art of Héctor G. Oesterheld and Alberto Breccia,” will be on view at Palazzo Bisaccioni from September 11 to November 22.
The exhibition is organized by ACCA – Academy of Comics, Creativity and Visual Arts and the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Jesi, with the support of the Italian Ministry of Culture, and curated by Giovanni Nahmias and Alessio Trabacchini.
For the first time, the Jesi exhibition turns its attention to the work of Héctor G. Oesterheld and Alberto Breccia, two seminal figures in Argentine and international comics. Their extraordinary artistic partnership profoundly reshaped the language of the ninth art, while giving powerful expression to the anxieties and contradictions of their time.
At the heart of the exhibition is a complete six-page story from Sherlock Time, dating from 1959 and marking the first series created by the two artists together. Through the language of science fiction, Oesterheld and Breccia explore the nature of humanity, the struggle between good and evil, and the threats that may lie ahead.
The exhibition continues with Mort Cinder, one of their most significant collaborations, represented by two original pages from 1962. It then moves to The Eternaut, featuring a rare page from the version drawn by Breccia in 1969. Conceived initially as a science-fiction narrative, the work takes on an intense political dimension, becoming a prophetic metaphor for Argentine history and an allegory of resistance.
The exhibition therefore traces not only Breccia’s artistic evolution and Oesterheld’s extraordinary narrative power, but also the profound civic and political engagement that lies at the heart of their work.
As the curators emphasize, this is a journey between past and future: from Mort Cinder, where the memory of history resurfaces through centuries of war and violence, to Sherlock Time, with its vision of the threats to come, and finally to The Eternaut, where past and future converge and the warning becomes a call to resistance.
It is an artistic and human story that has outlived its own time. Oesterheld, abducted and murdered by Argentina’s military dictatorship in 1977, continues to live on through his stories and through the visionary art of Alberto Breccia.
