Beschreibung:

WEIRD FANTASY Bound Volume, First Eleven Issues, 1950-1952 (RUSS COCHRAN Provenance) Author: Place: Publisher: Date: Description: EC. 1950-1952. Eleven consecutive issues of Weird Fantasy bound in heavy blue buckram cloth-over-boards, hand-sewn bindings, spine titled, ruled and decorated in gilt: "WEIRD FANTASY / 13 (1950) — 11," front panel personalized in gilt: "Russell V. Cochran." Contents comprise Weird Fantasy comic books #13 (1st issue, May-June, 1950) through #11 (Jan.-Feb., 1952). Comics are untrimmed and are in generally Very Fine condition, with no chips, tears or other conspicuous flaws aside from reduced cover gloss, a touch of light edgewear to some issues, and removed staples (as customary for bound periodicals). Off-white to cream pages. Very light handling marks and a light finger mark to cloth; gilt bright and unrubbed, binding solid. Sewn binding permits book to lay open flat with no loss at the gutter. Provenance: From a complete set of EC New Trend and New Direction titles bound to order by Russ Cochran in 1966. In 1953, sixteen-year-old Russ Cochran and a few friends started a local chapter of the EC Fan-Addict Club. They were among the first of over 23,000 eventual nationwide members (Cochran's badge number was 181). As he recalled in a 1999 interview with Grant Geissman, "We were Chapter number three, which always kind of amazed me that we'd gotten in that early." (See Tales of Terror: The EC Companion, p. 277). Cochran's devotion to EC was exclusive. Asked if he read any other comics after discovering the New Trend, he replied, "No, I stuck with ECs." When the Code and low sales kiboshed the New Trend and New Direction lines, Cochran gave up on comics altogether. "Gaines pulled the plug on the ECs at just about the same time that I was supposed to grow up and go to college, so that's basically what I did." Cochran put his ECs in a box, locked it and hid it away in his mother's attic. "That was kind of a strange thing to do with comic books, but I somehow knew that there would be a time in the future when I would want to revisit those books." Then came the encounter with Bill Gaines that reignited Cochran's passion for EC. As Cochran remembered it, "On sort of a whim I decided to write Bill Gaines. My letter said something to the effect that of the members of our chapter, EC Fan-Addict Club number three, one of us is a teacher, one is a minister, one is a doctor, one is a lawyer, and not an axe murderer in the bunch. I thought he would get a kick out of knowing that the influence of the ECs had not been detrimental to us. Anyway, he got a big kick out of the letter and wrote me back and said, 'Next time you're in New York... give me a call and we'll go to dinner.'" Gaines and Cochran became fast friends, and on one of their visits, when Cochran saw Gaines's complete bound set of original EC comic books, something clicked in his mind. He developed an overpowering desire to possess a complete hardcover EC library of his very own. This obsession would prove providential for future generations of Fan-Addicts. The worn-out reading copies he'd saved for years wouldn't suffice for what Cochran had in mind. So he replaced them in one fell swoop with a mint condition set with outstanding provenance. Grant Geissman tells the story in a June, 2020 EC Fan-Addict Club FB post: "Russ Cochran, so the story goes, bought a complete EC collection in 1966 for $300 from an ad in the Rocket's Blast Comicollector. Then he had the set bound.... Russ had his ECs bound after seeing Bill Gaines's EC bound volumes." The ad appeared in RBCC #44, and the dealer who sold the set to Cochran was David Wigransky, who placed the ad under his nom de plume, David Jay. Wigransky was one of the first great comic book collectors, buying mint copies of thousands of books right off the stands and preserving them in outstanding condition. In 1948, a teenaged Wigransky gained media attention for writing a letter of rebuttal to the Saturday Revi