ESCAPE AT 10,000 FEET

A middle-grade graphic novel chronicling the only unsolved commercial hijacking in aviation history.

On Nov. 24, 1971, a suit-clad White man strolled into Portland (Oregon) International Airport, black briefcase in hand. He purchased a one-way ticket aboard Northwest Orient Airlines’ Flight 305 to Seattle under the name “Dan Cooper,” seated himself behind three dozen Boeing 727 passengers, and slipped a note to a flight attendant just before takeoff. Unless he received $200,000 in cash, two front parachutes, and two back parachutes upon landing, Cooper promised to detonate the makeshift bomb in his briefcase. In Seattle, Cooper released his unwitting hostages alongside a new set of demands: Now, the plane would travel to Mexico City at the lowest possible speed, flying no higher than 10,000 feet with the landing gear deployed and a rear staircase lowered. Cooper never made it to Mexico: Instead, he leapt into the cold, rainy night above the forests of Washington. Though the hijacker vanished without a trace, his alias—misreported as “D.B. Cooper”—lives on. This stranger-than-fiction saga thrives thanks to spectacular design choices: “Dick Tracy”–esque, hard-boiled cartooning; rugged, mechanical typefaces; and a bevy of files, folders, and miscellaneous paperwork come together to form a fabulous criminal collage. Sidebars impart such important particulars as the precise weight of a dollar bill and Cooper’s conceptual-but–decidedly-amateur familiarity with parachutes.

A compulsively readable series debut.