Dan Cooper: The Comic Book Connection

The DB Cooper heist has a bizarre link to a relatively obscure French language Belgian comic book. Les Adventures de Dan Cooper was a bande dessinée (essentially a graphic novel) established in 1954 by writer and illustrator Albert Weinberg. This Dan Cooper was a Royal Canadian Air Force flying ace (who also occasionally flew rocket ships to the moons of Mars). Several of the eyewitnesses to the Cooper caper suggested there was something off about the hijacker’s accent, which led to speculation that he might have been Canadian. If that was the case, maybe he was familiar with the Dan Cooper comic books published in

French (they have never been translated into English) in Francophone Canada. Alternatively, if the hijacker had military experience (suggested by the parachute jump and general awareness of how things worked on an aircraft), he might have come across the comics while serving in Europe. Either way, these comics could be the source of the “Dan Cooper” nom-de-crime used for the hijacking. One comic book cover shows Cooper parachuting out of a plane, while another story concerned the payment of a ransom in a knapsack, just as requested by DB Cooper. Like the DB Cooper mystery, the Dan Cooper comic books are still going strong...