Shingo

Shingo was a reader of the original Marvel Generation 1 comic in the 1980s.

In a letter to the editors, another reader mentioned that his cousin Shingo thought Transformers was cool. The letters column ran with this, eventually wondering why Shingo himself didn't write in. No letter was immediately forthcoming, and Shingo became a running joke among the comic's readers and editors. Fans would occasionally sign letters with names such as "Shingo XVII", or end letters with statements like "By the way, I spoke with Shingo a while back and he says Transformers are cool." In Issue #41, the editors went so far as to hold a contest called Spot the Shingo, in which the object was to find Shingo's name hidden in the artwork of various panels.

Shingo eventually did write in a year or so later, but was sharply critical of the story direction the book had taken by that point. In particular he noted the harsh contrast between the often higher-quality UK stories as compared to the US stories -- at a time when most readers would likely not have even known of the existence of the UK book.

From Teletraan I: The Transformers Wiki, a Wikia wiki.