Dan Cooper (also known as Les Aventures de Dan Cooper) is a Franco-Belgian comics series about a fictional Canadian military flying ace and astronaut.
The title was conceived by Albert Weinberg in 1954 as Tintin magazine's answer to Buck Danny, which had become a great success for the rival Spirou magazine. It was the second of three prominent Franco-Belgian aviation-themed bandes dessinées, alongside Jean-Michel Charlier's Buck Danny (1948) and Tanguy et Laverdure (1959). Weinberg wrote and drew the strip for almost forty years, with the exception of three stories contributed by Charlier in the early 1960s.
As per Franco-Belgian comics tradition, each completed storyline would appear as a published album after first appearing as a serial in a weekly magazine.
Synopsis
Dan Cooper is a test pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Early story-lines featured futuristic science-fiction themes such as piloting a rocketship to the Martian moon Deimos; however later stories were more rooted in present-day themes.
Speculative connection to D. B. Cooper
A 1972 FBI composite drawing of D. B. Cooper
Although fairly obscure in the English-speaking world since it did not appear in English translation (apart from a short run in the UK comics Champion and Lion in 1966 under the title Jet Jordan), the comics series nevertheless gained a small measure of notoriety in 2009 in the United States as a result of speculation concerning the identity of the 1971 airplane hijacker who came to be known as D. B. Cooper, but who had actually identified himself as "Dan Cooper." Cooper boarded a flight from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington, claimed to have a bomb and demanded $200,000 in cash. He obtained the cash when the plane landed for refueling, and jumped from the Reno-bound airplane somewhere near Portland. Cooper was never apprehended or identified despite decades of FBI investigations, and the only evidence recovered outside the plane was a few thousand dollars in ransom cash buried or lost on a sandbar in the Columbia River.
The Cooper Research Team led by Tom Kaye, working in cooperation with Seattle-based FBI agent Larry Carr, speculated that the hijacker may have chosen an alias based on the fictional character. Kaye and colleagues suggest the hijacker may have been exposed to the comics while on a tour of duty in Europe, or that he may have been of French-Canadian origin. Some of the comics storylines seemingly match aspects of the D. B. Cooper case, including jumping out of a plane with a parachute, as well as a ransom being delivered in a knapsack.[1][2]
