Occasionally childhood memories come to mind and make you wallow in nostalgia. For me as a primary school student in the 1970s, the most desirable weekly magazine was YPS with gimmick. This children’s magazine differed from all the others at the time in that each time a more worthless than valuable toy – the gimmick – was included.

This had to be assembled first, if it was anything made of plastic. Sometimes it was a powder or simply a plastic sheet, which were then imaginatively advertised as “primeval crabs” or “adventure tents”. Often they were scientific gimmicks, like a hygrometer – a moisture meter, which failed with me because I couldn’t find a hair long enough, and which would contract or expand with changes in humidity and would control it that way – or because other parts were missing, like the zeppelin, to which I had no helium. Or simply that the parents didn’t play along, like with the square eggs.

While the gimmicks were usually quickly broken again, the comics still remained in the booklet. And they were of different quality. There were some original comics that only appeared in the Yps, like Yinnie+Yan, a TV crew that had their wild adventures. Or Yps, which was also the name of a striped kangaroo.

By chance, in December I came across the Argentinean comic scenarist and journalist Héctor Germán Oesterheld, who was unknown to me until then. And what a sensational work this activist, who “disappeared” under tragic circumstances during the military dictatorship, has left behind.

While exploring Buenos Aires, I passed the Argentine National Library, a masterpiece of Brutalism, and while photographing I stumbled over the Comic Strip Museum behind it, which commemorated Oesterheld’s work with an exhibition. As small as the museum was, as traditional the exhibition was, the more interesting the exhibits were and the more my interest in the person grew.

We imagine life as a lord, who thanks to generous family riches does not have to suffer, as a comfortable one. In the morning, i.e. rather at noon, we are awakened by the butler who serves us breakfast in bed with the morning paper, and after enjoying it to the fullest, we only have to slip into the ready and ironed clothes to indulge in polo, fox hunting or taking a stroll through the lush estates.

Far from it! The young and still green Lord Harold – the twelfth of that name – is an example of nobility with a passion. His is for the police, and that is where he wants to go. And not just to any district, where a lord is well-suited, but to the worst part of town, Blackchurch, where he is looking for a post. His wish is granted, and he is on the trail of a secret that leads him to mysterious deaths, a police station that seems to have a deal with the villains, and an inscrutable balance between villainous gangs. In the middle of all this is the pretty owner of a dive where all the threads come together.