Recently, someone has brought up the original Marvel fan club, known as the MMMS ("Merry Marvel Marching Society") and immortalized in cameo billboards on the cover of 1965 Marvel Superhero comics.
Apparantly, it was a "real" membership, in that there was a packet of materials mailed out to those who registered. Some say it included stationary, a pin, an ID card and a record but accounts vary.
How many of us ACTUALLY were members of this initial fan club?
Does anyone have a scan of the actual membership card?
I understand there were specific membership numbers assigned as well.
Does anyone know how high those numbers rose, or if there was ever a master database somewhere that recorded all the membership?
Please share your memories.
Replies
Sad to say, I was not a member of the MMMS. I don't even think it still existed when I started buying comics in earnest.
I don't remember. I remember signing up to FOOM, but no more than that.
I just looked up the MMMS in wikipedia and found the list of what was included in membership kits, and a link to the lame recordings that were included. I'm amazed that someone actually had worked to improve the recordings and offered them on line!
I was a member. No sure if I still have any of the stuff. I don't remember member lists in the books.
I recall seeing the yellow box at the base of the letters page that said "Let's Meet 26 More members"...but I never read it. Who cared? I don't recall if they had 26 new members in each issue, or if the listing changed from series title to series title. Did this feature show up at the base of the Bullpen Page, not the letter's page? In that case, there would be 26x12 members listed each year. That means about 300 per year. How many years did this run?
I just went to Mike's Amazing World of Marvel Comics and used Kang's Time Platform to go back and look at all the covers from around that classic period of Spring 1965... and I found that the MMMS orange cover box only shows up on 3 FF covers, 37-39... but starts to appear in march 1965, and then disappears by June 1965...and was not restricted to only the superhero books...it shows up on a western or two, but doesn't show up on ALL covers in any particular month. How odd.
Or maybe some artists were given some leeway about using it or not...whether it fit into their composition or not. Anyway, it's interesting.
Mark S. Ogilvie said:
I don't remember. I remember signing up to FOOM, but no more than that.
When FOOM came along I didn't join. I was a little put out because I had joined MMMS and they were now throwing that out to start over.
According to Marvel Comics: The Untold Story:
* 50,000(or 40,000, there are two conflicting passages) fans joined the MMMS at $1 each.
* Chip Goodman "deactivated" the MMMS so he could sell rights to a mail-order business, which resulted in Marvelmania. I never had any experience with Marvelmania.
* The only references to FOOM in the book are as an in-house-produced fanzine. I had the impression at the time that it was another club to join after I had already joined MMMS. Either that or I saw no need to get a fanzine from Marvel as I was already getting other (fan-produced) ones.
I joined the MMMS in 1967. The membership kit included a sheet of "stickers", 3 thumbnail size books, a large pin-on button and a floppy plastic record. Those are the items I remember but there may have been more such as a pad of paper, pencil etc. Mine was the second version issued - the recording featured the MMMS marching song and the theme from the Marvel Super Heroes cartoon show. The recording with the original kit was the more famous one featuring Stan interviewing various members of the bullpen. A friends older brother had the first version, I remember being disappointed with the record in my kit.
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