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It all began in 1986 with a small group of Transformers enthusiasts. Then the club exploded into the international scene after Issue 79 of the original Marvel comic series was released in 1991 (the last issue to have a letters column), when Liane "Tetra Reris" Elliot had a letter about the club published along with a picture of Megatron saying, "Some days you just can't win!" The club's membership swelled rapidly, perhaps too fast after that issue, to a total of 300 club members globally. The TransMasters were the only place to find new material for Transformers fans for several years between Generation 1 and Generation 2. During this period Liane published the Trans Action club newsletter.
When
G2
arrived there was a kind of
exodus of interest and Liane became frustrated with the club.
She would
end up dropping out and forming the Survivors
fan club (which is now defunct). A couple of other clubs
attempted to start up in this period,
but nothing ever came of them. Trans-Action
(now renamed The Cybertronian)
was
published briefly by some other people but only lasted about
three
issues before being canceled (publishing a regular fanzine can
be hard
work!)
At one point dues were created of $10 per year to help pay for the club newsletter, address lists and other correspondence to help promote the club. The Treasurer at the time ran off with our dues and could not be found again. Although, no fault of the club in general, this single act may have well led to a great exodus of many remaining members.
Enter Tony "Autoforse" Buchanan who took the lead and began to produce Auto-Update in 1993, which became the main newsletter until he no longer could do it in 1999. In 1991 Hasbro recognized the TransMasters by giving us a Non Profit agreement to use the Transformers as long as we place "Transformers are a registered trademark of Hasbro. Copyright (year) Hasbro" on everything we produced. (You should note that I have recently added "Takara Tomy" to this line due to their merger and to protect international rights.) This fact makes us the only non-licensee with such an agreement with Hasbro.
In
the late nineties, Earlwin Famor created the first Transmasters
website
(as well as the Yahoo Groups list and the TM webring). In 2005,
Peter
Phelps took over with a new website as well as a new TM Magazine
and TM
Comic that were e-publications.
With
the
death of AutoUpdate, the
sudden growth of the Internet as a medium to share fanzines,
artwork,
comic, news and opinions at almost no cost, the club has had a
steady
decline since. It is my belief that we did not do a good enough
job of
adapting and asking the question that needed to be asked. What
do
Transformers fans want from a club?
In
2010,
the Transmasters website moved servers and with this move, has
become re-focused to try and provide a web gateway for TF fans.
We
strive to chronicle the history of both the Transformers and the
TM
club here as well encourage new fandom activity. Won't you join
us?