Saturday, July 21, 2012

The Secret History of DB Cooper #5

by Brian Churilla

I hadn't realized, when I started buying this series, that it was going to end after five issues.  I was under the mistaken impression that the series was an on-going, and that it would chronicle just what DB Cooper was up to following his true historical disappearance.  Instead, this just takes us up to the events that happened on that airplane in the late 70s, but no further.

I'm not really complaining though, as this is an excellent comic.  Churilla has taken a real-life mystery, and weaved out of it one of the most bizarre and original comics of the last ten years.  In Churilla's telling of the story, DB Cooper, famous airplane hijacker, was really an agent for the CIA, involved in a remote assassination program carried out in an otherworldly landscape called The Glut. 

Cooper was so good at operating in the Glut that he no longer needed drugs to access it - he was really working in both worlds, going about his life (such as it was following the disappearance of his daughter and subsequent divorce from his wife) in our world, while tracking down monsters in another.

This final issue reveals a number of secrets, such as who had been working with the Soviets to access the Glut, where Cooper's daughter has been all this time, and just what was going to happen with Cooper's having become a gateway for Glut creatures to enter our world.  It also addresses just what happened on that airplane.

Churilla did an incredible job with this series.  It's a very intelligent comic, with a new approach to historical fiction.  I enjoyed it a great deal, and will definitely be keeping an eye out for whatever project Churilla decides to follow this up with.

No comments: