From The Scoop: Russ Cochran - Sharing the Excitement

From the October 13 issue of Gemstone Publishing's The Scoop:

For several decades now, Russ Cochran has channeled his passion in way that has delighted many of his fellow collectors and inspired at least a few of them to undertake similar efforts. His childhood zeal for EC Comics transformed itself into a mission to keep them in print and get them in the hands of new readers in addition to other EC fans. From his earliest efforts to the recently released first installments of the EC Archives, Russ Cochran has always found an opportunity to turn his love of the comics into a way to share them with others.

Russ Cochran began his career in comics with one purpose in mind, and generally speaking when he's set his mind to something he's achieved it, though usually not without causing some folks to do double-takes.

Whether it was recapturing the magic of the renowned EC Comics line or rebuilding his hometown of West Plains, Missouri, Cochran has found himself driven by the potent combination of nostalgia and a high intellectual regard for certain qualities of days gone by, feelings and thoughts to which many collectors can relate. He has labored for years in these seemingly disparate fields to keep bygones from being bygones.

As a young man newly graduated from the University of Missouri with a Ph.D. in physics (he was first in his class), he took up teaching at DrakeUniversity in Des Moines, Iowa. Through the 1960s he quickly rose to through the ranks to become head of his department. The home of his youth, though, was calling to him, as was another element of his childhood, EC Comics.

“Russ Cochran looks back to the future. Almost single-handedly, the West Plains native has renovated nineteen historic buildings in his hometown's downtown business district. Once deteriorated and almost abandoned, the city's heart now throbs with vitality. The 6'5”, bearded bear of a man is a constant presence on the West Plains square. He lives one-quarter block away in the historic Zorn building, and his cluttered, eclectic office nests comfortably in another nineteenth century building he restored,” Lin Waterhouse wrote in Ozarks Magazine.

Likewise, he took a similar approach with the EC Comics line, with what he remembered as an intelligently written, multi-genre approach that included horror, crime, science fiction, romance and suspense stories.
“It was simply that the level of writing and artwork in the EC comics was so much higher than other comics at that time. It seemed that Feldstein was writing to an adult audience, not a 'kiddy' audience,” Cochran said.

After developing a friendship with MAD publisher and EC patriarch Bill Gaines, Cochran began his crusade to preserve the comics he grew up on for future generations. On the suggestion of Gaines he started down the path that would eventually lead him to his current project, Gemstone Publishing's EC Archives series.

“Russ is a first-generation EC fan, because he actually bought the comics off the stands in the 1950s,” said Grant Geissman, noted collector, historian and author of Tales of Terror! The EC Companion. “He got hooked on the original comics, like I got hooked through the Ballantine reprints. He recognized that these bodies of work, taken as a whole, are probably the best comics ever done.”

After stepping down from a tenured professor and head of the physics department at DrakeUniversity, Cochran found the prospect of republishing the EC comics an exciting and challenging venture to dive in to. Although chancy, and in an area that he never saw himself venturing into, Cochran's passion ran too deep to put off any longer.

“At the time I had been a professor for 10 or 11 years and was becoming bored with it,” Cochran said. “My family was always supportive, but my wife and many of my close friends thought I was crazy to give up a tenured professorship for a risky business venture. But they were with me all the way!”

Cochran began the lengthy, and now decade-spanning, project by publishing the EC Portfolio. After a meeting in Gaines' offices, Cochran came across a stack of original EC artwork. In their original black and white state, the pages showcased the amazing detail that work that went into the work. This was how the artists had intended the pages to be seen, and he thought that other fans would want to share in his appreciation of it.

After the success of the EC Portfolio, he wanted to continue along the path that he had begun to blaze. A few years after he became friends with Gaines, the EC founder suggested over dinner that Cochran might want to consider the posiblility of republishing the EC in a slipcase format. With that, the birth of the EC Library, a collection of the best of each of the EC titles, came into existence. Although Cochran had never thought that he would be getting involved with publishing, after getting started with the EC Portfolio his course was set.

A combination of three factors drove Cochran to further explore the possibilities and potential of the EC Comics line: his growing boredom with teaching, his increased interested in comic books, and his belief that EC Comics line were the best comic books ever published and thus needed to be preserved.

“EC was a comic book line that didn't insult your intelligence,” said Robert Overstreet, publisher of The Official Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide and fellow noted EC aficionado. “All the EC stories had an Alfred Hitchcock-style twist-ending and the company was fan-oriented, always catering to their readers.”

“[It was] quality,” added Cochran. “The same reason that certain classic movies retain their popularity. ECs were very well-written and the artists went the extra mile to give these stories their best efforts. I especially liked Shock SuspenStories, closely followed by the horror and sci-fi books. I was a big Graham Ingels fan.”

“Great writing and great art,” said Jim Halperin, co-founder of Heritage Auction Galleries, of the EC Comic line. “[EC's are] the best in the entire history of comics, in my opinion.”

As each new set of EC Library books were released, their fan-base continued to grow and revitalize adults who had read the original comics as children. After the release of the final volume in the EC Library, The Complete Picto-Fiction, was released earlier this year, the next logical step was to find a new way to archive the entire EC collection for posterity.

And thus Cochran's publishing career begins anew with the release of the EC Archives from Gemstone Publishing. The Archives are a complete collection of every issue of every title published by EC Comics, completely re-colored the way they were intended to be done originally. The quality of the paper, the sharpness of the images and the heart-felt introductions by the top names in entertainment and comics history (George Lucas for Weird Science Volume 1, Steven Spielberg on Shock SuspenStories Volume 1, John Carpenter for Tales From The Crypt - Volume 1 and Steve Geppi for Two-Fisted Tales - Volume 1) make the EC Archives attractive to both new readers and veteran EC collectors.

“I think some collectors are thinking 'what, still another reprinting of ECs?' And others are thinking, as I do, that none of the previous reprinting efforts were done entirely correctly,” explained Cochran of the new reprints. “TheEC Library came the closest, but the artwork was not printed in full color. The EC reprint comic books were on cheap paper and used cheap methods of color. The EC Archives is the first time everything has been done exactly right: the right size, the right paper, the right color separations, etc.”
“Russ sent me some advance copies, and I think the new EC Archives books are, in a word, spectacular,” said Geissman. “It's a perfect reimagining and repackaging of the great EC comics, for yet another new generation of Fan-Addicts. The existing EC Fan-Addicts will love them, too!”

“I am very excited about it,” said Cochran in closing. “I think the EC Archives is the perfect format to package these comics so that schools and libraries everywhere can put them on their shelves.”

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