Recently, I wrote here about the Archie Comics fan club and noted how little it gave you for your dime. That's how I felt at the time…but Jim Newman (producer of this fine show) points out that a good condition Archie fan club kit recently sold on eBay for $40. That's a 40,000% return on your investment if, unlike me, you saved yours and took care of it. Not bad.
A better fan club — and one whose membership kit cost 25 cents but now goes for hundreds in good shape– was the EC Fan-Addict Club, operated by EC Comics, the publishers of (at the time) Tales from the Crypt, Mad, Weird Science, Crime SuspenStories and others. Your quarter got you a full-color membership certificate, a membership card, an embroidered patch and a very classy-looking membership pin. They also sent out a number of fan club bulletins that were quite interesting. They represent the first time to my knowledge that a comic book publisher presumed that its readers cared enough about the books to want real "news" as to what was coming up and (especially unprecedented) who was writing and drawing it.
EC Publisher Bill Gaines claimed that the kits were deliberately priced so as not to make a profit; that he wanted them to be a goodwill gesture rather than a means of making money off his line's most devoted followers. I think that respect for the reader shows, not only in the kit but in all the EC books. I'm not old enough to have joined but if I had, I'm sure I'd have felt a sense of pride and belonging. I did to some extent in the sixties when I joined the Merry Marvel Marching Society, which I'll write about here this weekend.