On D.B. Cooper
I have a fascination with weird mysteries and strange characters from history. So when a man in 1971 (seven full years before my birth) stepped out of an airplane with a briefcase full of cash and disappeared into history, I cannot help but latch on to them.
Dan Cooper has floated in my head space for years. (The alias D.B. Cooper was never actually used by the hijacker, but is based on poor early reporting.) At one point in my life I thought about turning his later years into a crime series equally influenced by Magnum, P.I. and Spenser. But as the years past and I never put him to paper, I realized I wanted to develop him a bit more than that.
While Cooper was a weird start to the 1970s, much of the decade fell into a lot of interest in weird esoteric nonsense. The government even did psychic research in the era, through a project called Stargate. As I have slowly put development into the psychic side of the MHP Universe, the realization came that I could combine the famous hijacker and bits of the historical narrative of psychics in my shared universe and create something interesting.
"The Second Life of D.B. Cooper" follows the former hijacker as he tries to stay out of the sight of his former Stargate handlers and use the money he stole to start a new life for himself. The first tale picks up eleven years later in Key West, Florida, as a pair of figures from his past make their returns.
Of course, I am not alone in using the mysterious figure. From books to comics to film, he has loomed in pop culture, even making a rather unique appearance in the first episode of Marvel’s recent Loki series.
In the three stories I’ve written for the character so far, I hope I’ve started to make a new mark on a real man that has become far more of a legend. And while the influences on the character might be obvious, I hope I’ve crafted something unique with the adventures of “The Second Life of D.B. Cooper.”
You can check out the first adventure of Coop’s second life in the pages of Smoke and Ash, where his long out-of-print first story is now available. In it, he meets a man from his past with a warning and a young woman in need of his help.
His later adventures will see reprints in upcoming collected stories volumes, but if you cannot wait to read them you can find them in the pages of two anthologies Legends of New Pulp Fiction and The Good Fight IV: Homefront.
