Global InformationEC Archives information
The EC Archives are an ongoing series of American hardcover collections of full-color comic book reprints of EC Comics, published by Russ Cochran and Gemstone Publishing from 2006 to 2008, and then continued by Cochran and Grant Geissman's GC imprint (2011–2012), and finally taken over by Dark Horse in 2013.
The output of Bill Gaines' EC Comics line in the 1940s and 1950s is one of the most critically acclaimed of the pre-Comics Code comics publishers (and one of the major casualties of the Comics Code). Such EC Comics titles as Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror and Weird Science are known even to people unfamiliar with the source material, due to movie and television adaptations.
Numerous reprints throughout the decades have also kept EC alive on book store shelves, starting with Nostalgia Press's EC Horror Comics Of The 1950s tome (1971), followed by publisher Cochran's six EC Portfolios (1971–1977), but primarily because of his Complete EC Library, printing all of the 'New Trend' comic titles (although missing the unique stories from the three 3-D EC Classics issues), as well as all of the 'New Direction' and 'Picto-Fiction' titles, and some of the 'Pre-Trend' title issues, in a series of 18 b&w box sets (19 if you include the fact that the Mad set was done in both color and b&w editions) containing a total of 66 hardcover books, all shot directly from the original art, mostly published from 1979 to 1996, with the Picto-Fiction box being delayed until 2006. Between 1992 and 2000, Cochran and Gemstone Publishing also produced 295 different full-color individual issue reproductions of all the "New Trend' (except Mad) and 'New Direction' EC Comics, and subsequently 63 EC Annuals which glued together titled chronological overstock copies of those individual issues in a new outer wrapper, in a nod to the original unsold-stock content of the EC Annuals of the 50s, although back in the 1950s there was no specification as to what issues may have been contained inside the covers to those various Annuals, which could vary from copy to copy.