Get In Shape!

Not to be confused with Michael Myers, The Shape is the first of a trio of features that made their single appearance in the first issue of Charlton Premiere in 1967. Since the Bat-Mania was coming down, the idea of campy superheroes had been taken to the limit at this point. Originally written by Ms. Marvel co-creator Roy Thomas who would eventually become the head editor of Marvel Comics, The Shape's script got rewritten by underground artist Grass Green that most fans of hippie comics would know as the creator of bizarre characters of Xal-Kot the Human Cat and Wildman. Grass Green also provided the artwork for The Shape, and the completed work sat on Charlton's shelf for a while since they couldn't fit it into any of their other humor comics like Go-Go, but it worked perfectly for an anthology of original ideas like Premiere, so it's because of The Shape's off-the-wall sensibility that the series got launched in the first place. It opens up with eccentric scientist Professor Scuba S. Duba who invents a synthetic lifeform comprised of various chemicals and funky radioactive rays. Duba's nephew Kevin Boyd is also his lab assistant who had enough of his bossy uncle and decides to quit one night, but he accidently switches on the Professor's latest sample which grows into a full humanoid form calling itself The Shape. The artificial android can "shape" itself into any form he wants, similar to Plastic Man, even though he gets scared off when his creator storms in shocked to see the newborn changeling bouncing off the walls. Shape escapes and finds two lousy commie spies sabotaging some power cables to steal plans from an army base, and Shape changes himself into a giant knife mocking their attempts to cut the cords. Kevin shows up and gets Shape to use his body to round up the commies in his own shredded off body, and the rubber robot turns into a flying horse so he and Kevin can get into the army base to stop the other spies. The remaining commies head off and try to get away in a weird black and yellow car which turns out to be The Shape incognito, making him the original Gobot! Prof. Duba shows up at the base to see the spies getting carted off, but his nephew Kevin deals with the situation by having Shape camouflage as his backpack, thus keeping the childlike superhero his own little secret. The story ends with the narration of "Wadda you think, Charlie?", meaning that Grass Green knew that this one-shot character probably won't go past its initial debut, even though decades later he would make various appearances in other indy comics starring public domain superheroes. As the world's first Transformer, this robot in disguise might have started a trend in toys nearly twenty years before Japan started churning out the suckers on a regular basis.