Created by Albert Weinberg | Publication date December 1954 | |
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Formats Original material for the series has been published as a strip in the comics anthology(s) Tintin magazine. Similar Buck Danny, Modeste et Pompon, Clifton, Achille Talon, Blueberry | ||
Dan Cooper (also known as Les Aventures de Dan Cooper) is a Franco-Belgian comics series about a fictional Canadian military flying ace and rocketship pilot.
Contents
The comics series was conceived in 1954 as Tintin magazine's answer to the Buck Danny series published in the rival Spirou magazine. It was written and drawn by the Franco-Belgian Albert Weinberg (1922–2011); however, a handful of the stories were written by Jean-Michel Charlier instead. As per the Franco-Belgian comics tradition, after being serialized in a weekly comic book magazine, each completed storyline would appear as a published album.
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
Although fairly obscure in the English-speaking world since it did not appear in English translation, 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". 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, suggesting that he 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.
