PLEASE BE ADVISED: The FBI’s most famous cold case may be solved via cartoon panels. Four decades, countless fruitless leads, and at least one deathbed confession later, the curious case of “D. B. Cooper” (so called because of a media snafu) has new life thanks to Dan Cooper, a French-language comic book about a Canadian Air Force test pilot. FBI agent Larry Carr, who took over the investigation in 2007, discovered the comic a year ago while trolling a discussion board on DropZone.com, a site dedicated to skydiving and, occasionally, the greatest skydiving mystery of all time.

Thanksgiving Eve, 1971, a man on a Portland-to-Seattle flight who gave his name as Dan Cooper announced he had a bomb and demanded a $200,000 ransom. When the FBI delivered the cash on the tarmac in Seattle, the man set his 36 fellow passengers free and ordered the flight crew to set a course for Mexico, only to don a parachute and jump with the cash over the Cascade Range. He was never seen again.

Spurred by talk of the comic book on DropZone, Carr sought the publication out and was surprised to find that not only did the title match the name of the infamous skyjacker, but that the cover of one edition depicted the title character parachuting out of a plane.

The comic had never been translated into English. Did the culprit speak French? And, like the Dan Cooper in comic, was the Dan Cooper in the heist French Canadian? That would be significant, given that over the decades the strongest persons of interest have hailed from New Jersey, Florida, and Utah.

Since releasing this new clue to the public in March, the closest thing Carr’s had to a lead is an email from a lawyer in The Hague working with the International Criminal Court on War Crime Tribunals. The lawyer grew up reading the comics and offered insight into the series, which Carr isn’t yet at liberty to disclose. “No hard leads,” explains FBI spokesperson Roberta Burroughs. “More like a dialog that fills in some blanks.”