by Doc Quantum
In a suburban neighborhood in Hub City, a red-haired young man tucked his two little girls into bed and kissed them goodnight. After turning off the lights, he left only the dim Christmas lights that the girls had insisted on decorating their rooms with for the holiday season. After all, the very next day was Christmas morning, the most special day of the year.
The nightly routine was simpler than it was for most parents of young children. He and his wife had really lucked out with kids who fell asleep when they were supposed to. Well, he had lucked out, at any rate. His ex-wife now wanted nothing to do with any of them.
Kevin Boyd had never been very lucky with women. At least, he had never been lucky with the women he’d always been attracted to. He had a knack for pursuing the wrong kind of woman — the kind who would chew him up, spit him out, and move on to the next guy. That, in a nutshell, described the girls’ mother. She had a few psychological issues to deal with, to say the least, and taking care of her own children just wasn’t something she could handle. Oh, she had agreed to marry him after she became pregnant, but by the time their second child was only a year old, she decided she no longer wanted to be a wife and mother. Goodbye, Jolene.
This left Kevin struggling to raise two girls alone while trying to keep food on the table with a single income. He worked as a high school science teacher, but it had taken him years to find a good school that could hire him full-time. During the years he worked as a substitute, he often had to take odd jobs on the side, which was difficult with two girls to watch over.
With no family left to speak of, Kevin felt entirely alone. His parents had died when he was young, leaving him an orphan. He was raised by his uncle, an eccentric old scientist — some would call him a mad scientist — named Professor Scott B. Duba. Behind his back, ever since his college days, everyone called him “Scuba” Duba. Eventually, he warmed to the nickname and began using it himself, in place of his real name. Uncle Scuba was a hard man to live with, never letting the boy forget that he had no obligation to take him in and that the boy had to earn his keep through long days of hard work.
However, something happened when Kevin was a lonely young boy that changed his life forever. One night in 1966, after a particularly grueling day of cleaning his uncle’s laboratory and doing odd chores around the house, Kevin decided to run away. Like most young boys who run away, he had not planned where he would go; he just needed to escape. His uncle’s bedroom was near the front door, so the only escape route was through the back door that led into the lab.
As Kevin tiptoed through the dark laboratory that night, trying to find the doorway by memory, he crashed into something. The impact caused the lights in the lab to turn on, and it also activated his uncle’s latest invention.
It was a curious experiment. Professor Duba had created a small figurine from a type of plasticized chemical of his own invention and placed it in a large glass bowl. On each side of it were special lamps, one emitting a super-hypertensity white aura-light and the other casting an ultra-ebonized black light. The eccentric scientist, like a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein, believed he could somehow bring the figurine to life if he could only discover the correct dosage of light beams to shine at it. To Kevin, it appeared to be just another of his uncle’s crazy inventions destined to fail.
But on that summer night in 1966, when Kevin accidentally activated the device, a miracle occurred that would change his life forever.
As the blasts of white and black light struck the plastic figurine, it began to change shape, to slowly grow, until it reached the size of a full-grown man. The figurine wore a stylized yellow and black costume reminiscent of a comic-book character, complete with a cartoonish face defined only by a mouth, two eyes, and eyebrows. It resembled a crash-test dummy come to life, complete with a black-and-yellow-checkered circular crash-test logo. This logo was a modification of the international maritime signal flag Lima, which signaled a vessel to stop immediately — a fact Kevin would learn only years later in high school.
Understandably shocked by this development, Kevin uttered, “It looks almost human now, yet it isn’t! It… it’s only a — a shape!”
But he was positively astonished when the thing repeated his words. “Only… a shape…” Whatever his uncle had created, it was intelligent and able to mimic the sounds of the English language within seconds of its creation, and could apparently understand it soon enough as well.
As a child, Kevin was able to accept this new, unexpected development far better than an adult in his situation might have. He began to talk with the new creature, who proudly proclaimed himself to be Kevin’s friend. The Shape, as he was newly named, then showed Kevin some tricks he could do, transforming into a giant bouncing ball and proceeding to bounce all over the lab.
The terrific racket caused by the living bouncing ball, of course, awoke his uncle, who stormed into the lab angrily, then quickly became excited to find out that his experiment had worked. The Shape, sensing danger from the old scientist, fled through the window before Professor Duba could experiment on him. The Shape’s intuition proved correct, as the unpredictable old scientist was immediately angered that his creation would run away, and he called the authorities — any authorities he could reach — to proclaim the Shape a menace that needed to be destroyed.
Kevin tried to talk his uncle down, but he knew how crazy the old man could be, so he ran out of the house in pursuit of his new friend. He soon spotted the Shape escaping with feet transformed into bicycle wheels. All thoughts of danger vanished from the creature’s childlike mind as it enjoyed the sensation of rolling away. He went so fast that Kevin couldn’t keep up with him, but winded as he was, the boy kept running after his friend.
By the time he found him, the Shape had already gotten himself into trouble. Spotting a couple of men at an electrical tower, he had approached them, eager to join in on their fun. Unbeknownst to him, the men were communist saboteurs from East Germany, sent to cut off power to a nearby U.S. Army base called Camp Kiljoy. The spies then planned to break into the base to steal secret missile plans.
Kevin arrived just in time to overhear the spies’ conversation and witness the Shape inadvertently assisting them when he turned himself into a knife, then electrocuted himself on the wires, shorting them out as he cut through. As the spies rushed to their car to head for the base, Kevin hurried over to find his friend shaken but relatively unhurt.
In fact, the only thing that appeared to have been hurt was the Shape’s feelings, since he’d thought the men had played a mean trick on him. After Kevin quickly explained that the men were enemy spies, the Shape acted just as rapidly, turning his hand into a lasso that he used to capture the spies before knocking them out. Kevin then told the Shape they needed to get to Camp Kiljoy as fast as possible to stop several other spies from carrying out their plans, as more than just the two they had seen were involved.
The Shape transformed into a yellow and black horse — like one seen on the ubiquitous cowboy TV shows and movies that were constantly playing on the television in the laboratory — and Kevin jumped onto his back. Within a few minutes of riding, they arrived at Camp Kiljoy, where the Shape grew wings from his back and flew them over the fence like some kind of Pegasus. There they located a building that was conveniently labeled Headquarters of Secret Documents and lay in wait for the spies they knew were inside.
When the spies ran out to the getaway car they thought had been left for them by their allies, they were surprised when the yellow and black convertible moved forward of its own accord and crashed into a tree, knocking them out cold. Kevin emerged from behind the bushes where he had hidden and congratulated the Shape on capturing the spies.
Unfortunately, before he could get the Shape to hide, all the lights came back on, flooding the area with soldiers. Kevin looked around and saw no sign of his friend, only a small black and yellow knapsack. As the officers arrived and recognized the fallen men as the notorious spies Karl Mikten and Vic Facsh, whom they had been trying to find for months, Kevin casually picked up the knapsack.
The soldiers were astonished, since they were under the mistaken impression that the little boy had captured these spies himself. At that moment, Kevin’s uncle, Professor Duba, arrived in his tiny old car. Since the soldiers had seen no one there but the boy and the spies, the eccentric scientist’s wild claims that a fantastical creation of his own called the Shape had helped Kevin capture the spies fell on deaf ears. The Professor took Kevin home, planning to use the boy as bait to capture the Shape himself for experimentation, unaware that the Shape was right there on Kevin’s shoulder in the form of that knapsack. (*)
[(*) Editor’s note: See “It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s the Shape,” Charlton Premiere v2 #1 (September, 1967).]
That marked the first adventure shared between the two best friends, but it would not be the last. Over the following years, as Kevin grew up, he and the Shape tackled numerous cases, fighting criminals, spies, and even the rare super-villain — all while keeping the Shape out of the clutches of his erstwhile creator, Professor “Scuba” S. Duba.
Kevin often thought of his old friend, especially at times like these. However, now was not the time to delve too deeply into the past. It was Christmas Eve, after all, and it was time for him to play Santa Claus. Knowing his girls would be up by the crack of dawn, he wanted to make sure everything was ready for them by the time they awoke.
Taking out the carefully wrapped presents from a shelf above his closet, where the girls couldn’t reach them, Kevin laid each of the gifts under the elaborately decorated Christmas tree, artfully arranging them to create the illusion of more presents than they had ever seen. It was already past midnight, and he was exhausted as he took a moment to admire the fully lit tree and all the gifts beneath it before switching off the lights and heading to bed.
If he had been just a little more clearheaded, Kevin Boyd might have noticed that one of the presents looked different from the others. It was wrapped in a ribbon and bow like the gifts next to it, but it wasn’t sheathed in red, blue, or gold wrapping paper. Instead, it was yellow and black, and it seemed to shift slightly in place as if anticipating being unwrapped on Christmas morning, if it could wait that long.
***
It was Christmas Eve in Hub City, but Angela Revere was in no hurry to go home. The young secretary, with shoulder-length black hair and thick-rimmed glasses, had felt like a prisoner in her own home for months now, ever since her uncle had moved in with her. She knew that her dearly departed mother had never approved of her eccentric brother and would have never allowed him to stay in their house. But Angela was all alone now, as both her mother and father had died a few years earlier, leaving her the family home and a sizable mortgage that she could barely afford with her receptionist job at Kord Industries.
When her uncle arrived in bad shape a few months earlier, beaten and bruised, and looking as if he was on death’s doorstep, pleading for her help, Angela felt she had no choice. Stitching up and cleaning his wounds even as he cursed her out from the pain, she nursed him back to health and hoped that, once he recovered, he would move out.
That had been five months ago now, and he was still occupying her home. Not only that, but her uncle had taken over most rooms in the house with his experiments. He was a scientist who had turned to crime when Angela was still a child, and he remained a wanted man for numerous scientifically based crimes over the years. Unable to purchase the equipment he needed, he forced Angela to do his dirty work for him.
But she soon proved unable to procure everything he needed through the usual channels, such as Radio Hut or local bankruptcy auctions. With her limited income, she could hardly afford to put food on the table, let alone buy expensive electronics and chemicals. That was when he suggested she start taking things home from work. Shocked at the idea that her uncle wanted her to steal from her employer, Angela resisted. But as each day passed, he kept pestering her, breaking down her resolve, until she finally acquiesced.
The first theft was a small one, just a circuit-switcher. But when she got away with stealing that little item, her uncle demanded more. Now she was stealing a few items each week for him, smuggling them home in her large purse, and she felt sick to her stomach with guilt. Her boss, Ted Kord, had been so good to her over the years, hiring her directly out of high school and offering her a job with great perks despite her lack of secondary education. She owed so much to Mr. Kord, and stealing from him made her feel like dirt. But her uncle never gave her a choice in the matter. As far as he was concerned, she owed him — the whole world owed him — and soon, the world would pay everything it owed to him, and more.
Angela had delayed returning home for hours now. After working a half-day at Kord Industries, she had gone out to walk around downtown for hours, just looking through the store windows at all the Christmas displays and listening to carolers singing songs at the Christmas tree display at City Hall. Inwardly, she had hoped in vain that some kind of Christmas spirit would come upon her, washing away her troubles at the same time, like something out of a movie. But all it had done was to make her more miserable. She had already found herself in tears while everyone around her laughed and sang songs of good cheer; joy had been absent from her life for far too long.
It was already dark by the time she drove into her driveway and walked into the house, the only one on the street with neither Christmas lights nor a Christmas tree to be seen. In fact, the curtains on all the windows were drawn and had been for a while now. It had been five months now since daylight had entered her home.
“Well?” her uncle’s gruff voice called out. “What took you so long, darling?” He always called her that, but it never sounded endearing, since it was often followed by threats.
“I went out with a few of the girls from work, Uncle,” Angela replied in the little girl’s voice she always affected when speaking with him.
“Oh? Why is that?” he asked, raising an eyebrow as he looked up from his work table — her former coffee table modified with longer legs and cluttered with various devices and light bulbs. “You didn’t tell them anything about your dear old uncle, did you?”
“Of course not, Uncle!” she replied, a bit too quickly. “I…”
“Next time they invite you out,” he interrupted while tightening a screw in one of his makeshift devices, “just say no. I don’t want you getting too close to any of them. I wouldn’t want any ‘friends’ of yours thinking they could drop by uninvited. Do I make myself clear?”
“I know, Uncle, I know,” Angela said sadly. “We just went out because it’s Christmas Eve.”
“Eh? What’s that? Speak up, darling.”
“It’s Christmas Eve, Uncle,” she replied.
“December 24th already,” he sighed. “I’ve lost track of things again. Well? Did you bring me what I asked for?” He chuckled, a dry rasp that turned into a coughing fit. “Where’s my, ah, ‘Christmas present,’ darling?”
“It’s here,” said Angela, pulling an object from her large purse and handing it to him.
“Yes, yes, I do appreciate it, darling,” he said, inspecting the flashlight-like object. “Just as I appreciate your discretion. I’ll remember it when the name of Doctor Spectro ascends once more to the heights of grandeur!” As he spoke his name, her uncle held the object up to the ceiling, shining a green glow that increased in intensity as he adjusted a lever.
“Of course, Uncle,” Angela replied, doing her best to keep from tearing up again. “Whatever you say.”