Taking a look here at the back half of FOOM #3, the third issue of Marvel’s in-house fan club magazine as packaged and produced by Jim Steranko.
In the days before formal indexes and Marvel Masterworks volumes and the internet, these Indexes to the major titles were a bit of a godsend for information freaks, even if some of the credits here are a little bit suspect. Nobody was doing an especially deep dive into these questions in 1973.
More simple word games to play with. As I’ve mentioned in prior installments, when it was first initiated, nobody was quite sure what the target demographic of FOOM was going to turn out to be. So these early issue always included some material that younger readers might enjoy as well.
A two-page preview of some upcoming Marvel projects, with lots of praise and mentions of Jim Steranko himself–which isn’t al that surprising, given that he wrote it.
Everything you always wanted to know about Spider-Man apparently didn’t include the fact that his name has a dash in it.
This write-up on the creation of Spider-Man interestingly mentions that Jack Kirby was the one who came up with the name and the initial design, even though it wasn’t used. This is perhaps the first time that this portion of the Spider-Man creation story was committed to paper–and it’s contradicted not long afterwards in Stan’s introduction to the Spidey chapter of the ORIGINS OF MARVEL COMICS book.
And this section reveals that, despite having been against the move to graduate Spider-Man from High School and send him to College, Steve Ditko had drawn out a map of the Empire State University campus for himself so that he could keep the environment consistent.
This listing of contributors to the FOOM Create A Hero contest includes several names that would go on to enter the field professionally at a later date.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
The first JLA annual and Flash annual had a complete list of relevant stories and credits up to that time. As someone too young to have caught most of the stories, I read the lists over with utter fascination — what were the Decoy Missions of the Justice League? Why was there a Double Danger on Earth?
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