Russ Cochran was born in the sleepy little town of West Plains, Missouri, where he still lives. His childhood was spent around the clear, spring-fed rivers of the Ozarks, and two of his best friends, which he devoted much of his time to, were comic books and movies. In the 1940s, they were the main avenues of escape for the active imagination of a young boy growing up in a world that bracketed a rural idyllic lifestyle and the atrocities of World War II. There was no television then, but twice-weekly escapes to the darkness of the local movie houses included newsreels with their grim pictures of the War in Europe.
Every kid in town had a large collection of comic books. They hoarded them, hid them away in closets or under their beds. Their mothers found them and threw them away.

They traded comic books with their friends. “Wasting” an afternoon or a rainy Saturday with a stack of comic books was a favorite pastime. In the summer of 1950, Russ became a teenager and started to lose interest in comic books. There was still a large stack of them under the bed, but he no longer objected when they were invaded by younger brothers. The super-hero stories seemed to be all the same…even the great Donald Duck stories lost some of their luster…and then one day it happened. Probably in 1951, just as he was about to “outgrow” comic books, he happened upon his first EC comic book. And immediately, he saw that they were different. The writing, the artwork, the twist endings to these stories…they were different. Not kid stuff.   And at that point he began to collect EC comics.
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He had outgrown Superman and Donald Duck, but these new EC comics, like Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, Weird Science…were a cut above all the others. They became his new passion.

Then, in 1955, two things happened: EC comics fell victim to the “those terrible comic books are causing an increase in juvenile delinquency” forces, and, Russ graduated from high school. Before he went away to college he built a strong wooden box, put a padlock on it, placed all his EC comics inside, and hid the box in the attic of his home on Cass Avenue.

Now flash forward nine years…Russ has earned his Ph.D. in Physics and is starting a career in teaching, having accepted a job as Chairman of the Physics Department at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. Before leaving Missouri for Iowa, one hot summer day he remembers the wooden box in the attic, the one that is filled with EC comics. He opens the box, recalling how much he loved these comic books

By now a new area of collecting had appeared…collecting comic books…and Russ decided to complete his collection of EC comics. He started writing to other collectors and attended his first comics convention in 1965, where he was amazed and delighted to find that there were many others who, like him, treasured the comic books from their youth.

He decided to write a letter to Bill Gaines, the publisher of EC comics, who was now publishing MAD magazine. And Bill Gaines answered!, and invited Russ to New York to meet him and have dinner. They soon became good friends, and each time he went to New York for a comics convention or a physics meeting, he would get together with Bill for dinner and then back to Bill’s apartment to watch an old movie from Bill’s collection of 16mm films.

One evening, they were sitting in a nice Manhattan restaurant finishing dinner, when Russ said to Bill, “Bill, your EC comics were the best things ever done in the medium, and there is a new generation of comic book readers out there now…why don’t you republish them?” And Bill answered, “No way! I have all I can handle now with MAD! And people gave me a lot of grief about publishing those comics!...Why don’t you do it?”
Russ continues…”Soon after that, I started thinking, Yes, why don’t I do it? And the idea of becoming a publisher was born. I continued to teach for a few more years as I experimented with publishing comics for collectors, and then decided to embark on the most ambitious project anyone had ever undertaken for comics collectors…to republish the entire line of EC comics…over 300 issues…in a permanent hardcover form for collectors and libraries. I called it the EC Library, and it took more than twenty years to complete it. In 1975 I resigned my tenured professorship at Drake and devoted my full energies to publishing, and at the same time I moved my family back to my home town of West Plains, Missouri. For the past 30 years I have been publishing and republishing the EC comics in various formats.”