Richards, Reed

**Dr. Reed Richards** is a scientist and inventor, better known as **Mister Fantastic**, who has been considered the smartest man on Earth. He is a polymath with mastery of all the sciences including, electrical, mechanical, aerospace engineering, electronics, chemistry, physics, biology and beyond. Richards was exposed to high levels of cosmic radiation along with his best friend Ben Grimm, then girlfriend Sue Storm and her younger brother Johnny Storm, during a trip to space in the stolen rocket, the *Marvel-1*. The radiation mutated him and his friends, allowing him to stretch and mold his body at will. Together they became the Fantastic Four, a team of adventurers who explored space, time and alternate dimensions and saved the world along the way from science-based threats.

## Reed Richards

### Aliases

Mister Fantastic, Brains, Brain-Box, Stretch (Ben Grimm), Doctor Fantastic, Professor Richards

### Relatives

Susan Storm-Richards (wife, undead), Jonathon Storm (brother-in-law, in-stasis), Franklin Richards II (son, dead), Nathanial Richards (father, dead), Evelyn Richards (mother, dead), Jonathon Richards (paternal grandfather, dead), Laura Richards (paternal grandmother, dead), Theodore Richards (paternal uncle, dead), Hamish Richards (1st cousin), Angus Richards (1st cousin once removed)

### Occupation

College Professor (formerly), Scientist, Cosmic Adventurer (formerly), slave

## Biographical information

### Place of birth

Central City, California, United States of America

## Physical description

### Height

6'1" originally (1.85m originally), height varies when powers are in use

## History

### Early Years

Reed Richards was born in Central City, California the only son of wealthy physicist Nathaniel Richards and his wife Evelyn, was a child prodigy with special aptitude in mathematics, physics, and mechanics. Evelyn died when Reed was 7-years-old.

#### Schooling

Nathaniel encouraged and guided young Reed in his scientific studies, and Reed was taking college-level courses. Reed entered college at fourteen at CalTech (California Institute of Technology). He also attended Harvard University and M.I.T.. He studied abroad at the University of Vienna in Austria. It is there that he met fellow "super-genius" Alyssa Moy. By the time he was eighteen, he had obtained four degrees in fields such as engineering, math, and physics.

It was when he was working on his fifth at State University in Hegeman, New York, that Reed Richards first met two of the most important individuals in his life. He was assigned to room with a foreign student, a scientific genius named Victor von Doom. The imperious Von Doom, taking an immediate dislike to Richards, decided to take other quarters. Instead, Richards gained as his roommate former high school football star Benjamin J. Grimm, who became Richards’ closest friend. Richards was already intending to build a starship for interstellar travel. When he told his ambitions to Grimm, Grimm jokingly said that he would pilot the starship for Richards someday.

While attending State University, Richards rented living quarters at the Manhattan boarding house owned by the aunt of a young woman named Susan Storm. Reed instantly fell in love with Sue, although he soon deemed it prudent to move out, because he was too distracted from his work due to his romance with Sue.

Richards and Doom were intellectual peers. The two debated esoteric theories day and night that amazed faculty members, who compared their brilliance to that of Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci. While Richards designed his starship. Doom became obsessed with developing a machine that could project the astral form of a being into other dimensions. Reed pointed out a flaw in Doom's calculations, but Doom arrogantly ignored his warning, feeling that Reed was trying to upstage him. The machine exploded, scarring Doom's face. He was soon expelled for conducting unethical experiments. As Doctor Doom, von Doom would later become Richards’ greatest rival and enemy. Doom blamed Richards for his deformities and he continually tried to prove himself superior, especially intellectually. They battled many times, but Richards almost always emerged triumphantly.

#### Soldiers

Reed and Ben later served in the military together. Their time in war increased their trust in each other.

#### Parental Fate

Three years before Richards tested his starship, his father mysteriously disappeared. Nathaniel Richards had devised a time machine which he had used to attempt to journey into the future of his own world. However, the machine actually transported him to an alternate Earth with a history considerably different from their own. Reed Richards would be reunited with him while visiting this alternate Earth years later. Before Nathaniel Richards left his own time, he made arrangements that left two billion dollars to his son. Reed Richards spent most of the money on his project to build and launch his starship. This project, based in Central City, California, received further funding from the federal government.

### Fantastic Four

#### First Adventure

Richards recruited his old friend Ben Grimm, who had become a successful test pilot and astronaut, to pilot the starship, which was named the *Marvel-1*. Richards was joined in California by Susan Storm. Richards and Storm were dating at the time. Shortly before the starship was to be launched, Richards used his scientific knowledge to defeat the extraterrestrial being Gormuu, who had intended to conquer Earth. Richards’ encounter with Gormuu strengthened his resolve to finish the starship, which he saw as a first step for mankind to defend itself from extraterrestrial threats.

#### Birth of the Fantastic Foursome

When the federal government then threatened to withdraw its funding from the starship project, Richards decided to take the *Marvel-1* on a test flight before the funding was withdrawn. Grimm was opposed to the idea, warning that the starship's shielding might prove inadequate protection from the intense radiation storms. Nevertheless, Grimm was persuaded to serve as pilot, and Susan Storm and her adolescent brother Johnny insisted on accompanying Richards as passengers. The four friends stole onto the launch facility, entered the starship, and blasted off. They intended to travel through hyperspace in the ship to another solar system and back in order to convince the government to reconsider. However, when the ship passed through a cosmic ray storm, it was met with an unexpected level of intensity. Since the ship was designed to shield against ordinary levels of radiation, the cabin volume was subjected to intense cosmic ray bombardment which irradiated the four passengers and wrought havoc on the ship's controls. Pilot Grimm was forced to abort the flight and return to Earth.

Once back on Earth, the four passengers discovered that the cosmic rays had triggered mutagenic changes in their bodies. Reed Richards discovered that his body had become malleable and that he now had the ability to elongate his body at will. Richards convinced the others that the four of them should use their new-found powers for the good of humanity as members of a team he named the Fantastic Four. Richards, who became the team’s leader, named himself Mister Fantastic, while Ben Grimm, Susan Storm, and Johnny Storm named themselves the Thing, the Invisible Girl (later the Invisible Woman), and the Human Torch, respectively. The profits from Richard's patents and royalties funded the team's activities.

Under Richards’ leadership the Fantastic Four has become Earth’s most honored team of superhuman adventurers, and has saved the world from conquest or destruction many times. Richards proposed to and eventually married Susan Storm in a wedding ceremony attended by most of the world's heroes, and they had a son, Franklin.

Franklin proved to be a vastly powerful mutant whose fluctuating abilities have alternately saved or menaced both the Fantastic Four and the world, forcing Reed to take steps to contain Franklin's powers. On one such occasion, Franklin's mind was temporarily shut down. An outraged Sue, already resentful of Reed at this point because she felt that he did not regard her as an equal, left her husband and quit the team. She was replaced in the Fantastic Four for an extended period by Medusa of the Inhumans, but Sue reclaimed her spot on the roster after she and Reed finally reconciled. However, Reed and Sue were separated.

A number of Earth's most powerful heroes -- Mister Fantastic, Doctor Strange, Black Bolt, Professor X, Iron Man, and Namor -- traveled to Skrullos to confront the Skrull King, informing him that the Earth was strictly off-limits. Upon arrival, however, the heroes were captured and experimented upon before they were able to escape. Mr. Fantastic would later blame himself for the Skrulls increased transforming powers. While the meeting predictably turned violent, the experience would provide the basis for the later establishment of the Illuminati. The secretive group of Earth's most influential heroes would meet only a few times, and these, only to tackle events of extraordinary importance. Reed added the viewpoint and perspective of a scientist.

After losing his powers for a time, Reed was imprisoned and impersonated by the Brute, his then-criminally insane counterpart from the High Evolutionary's Counter-Earth, who ultimately exiled himself to the Negative Zone after finally regaining his senses.

The Fantastic Four even broke up for a while, during which time Doom hypnotized Reed into capturing his former teammates as the Invincible Man. The team regrouped after Reed took a solo space flight into the Van Allen radiation belts, guided by information from colleague Stephen Beckley (later Comet Man), regaining his powers at amplified levels, and the Fantastic Four foiled Doom's latest world-conquering plot. Later, seeking a more normal family life, Reed and Sue established a household in small town Belle Porte, Connecticut for a while, living quietly in disguise there as the Benjamin family while continuing to serve with the Fantastic Four in their original identities.

After a conflict during which he mercifully spared the life of the planet-eater Galactus, Reed found himself placed on trial in an interstellar court by survivors of the many worlds Galactus had consumed; but Reed was exonerated once the last-minute testimony of Eternity proved to the court that Galactus was a necessary aspect of the cosmos.

On the family front, Sue's second child was stillborn despite Reed's frantic efforts to save their unborn baby; Reed discovered that his own long-lost father Nathaniel was living a new life with a new family on Other Earth; and an embittered Thing quit the Fantastic Four, partly because a well-intentioned Reed had withheld information from him regarding the state of Ben's ability to resume human form, an ability Ben lost due in part to Reed's misinformation. Ben's hand-picked replacement, She-Hulk, served a long stint with the Fantastic Four, but eventually left after Ben finally reconciled with the group and rejoined their ranks.

During the period She-Hulk replaced The Thing as member of the Fantastic Four, the symbiote escaped from the Baxter Building with the help of Kristoff Vernard. It possessed Reed briefly before deciding to use Franklin as its new host. The symbiote fought the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man until it managed to successfully possess Franklin, but the child was able to reject the symbiote thanks to his father and Spider-Man's help.

Seeking a more normal family life again, Reed and Sue retired from the Fantastic Four altogether to concentrate on raising Franklin, leaving Ben in charge of the group. To replace them, Ben recruited his friend Ms. Marvel (Sharon Ventura) and Crystal (who had already served as Sue's substitute during and after Sue's first pregnancy); however, Reed and Sue's retirement was short-lived. After teaming with several Avengers to rescue a captured Franklin during a demonic invasion, Reed and Sue reluctantly agreed to join the Avengers, who were critically short-handed at the time. But Reed was too accustomed to leadership himself to serve smoothly under Captain America for long, so Reed and Sue amicably stepped down from active Avengers membership after only a few missions with the team. They later resigned their Avengers membership altogether after rejoining the Fantastic Four. They remained friends and allies to the Avengers, though.

When Reed and Doom seemingly died as a result of their conflict with the alien Hunger, they were actually spirited away by the space-time-warping Hyperstorm, mad son of an alternate-future Franklin Richards. Hyperstorm kept Doom as a tortured captive and trapped Reed in the distant past for months, during which time the world believed both Reed and Doom to be dead. In Reed's absence, Sue took over leadership of the Fantastic Four and served capably in the role, recruiting Ant-Man as the team's new scientist. However, she refused to believe Reed was truly dead, and she rebuffed romantic advances from Namor. Reed was eventually rescued.

The entire Fantastic Four appeared to die in battle with the psychic monster Onslaught. Instead, they (and the Avengers) found themselves on Counter-Earth, in a pocket universe Franklin had created to save them. In a sense, they had been reborn and had to start their lives over. Once the heroes on Counter-Earth realized what had happened, they returned to their original homes.

An even more surprising resurrection unfolded during the team's reality-warping conflict with the cosmic being Abraxas when Franklin revealed he had used his powers to rescue Sue's seemingly stillborn second child years earlier, and that this child had been raised in an alternate future to become the Marvel Girl (Valeria Von Doom) who was now an ally of the present-day Fantastic Four. As a side-effect of Abraxas's defeat, Marvel Girl was restored to her original state, as an unborn child in Sue's womb. This time, Sue's pregnancy resulted in the birth of a healthy baby girl, christened Valeria in memory of Doctor Doom's first love. (Doom had insisted on naming the child in exchange for assisting with the difficult birth.) Later, Doom would exploit his special bond with the child to employ her as a mystical familiar, using sorcery to mount one of his most ruthless and terrifying attacks on the Fantastic Four ever.

In the end, Doom was taken by his own demonic benefactors, but not before he hideously disfigured Reed's face as a petty parting gesture. Physically and emotionally scarred, Reed led the Fantastic Four into Doom's now-leaderless Latveria, where he worked obsessively to dismantle Doom's regime, neutralize his arsenal, erase Doom's legacy and create a better state, becoming increasingly tyrannical himself in the process and ignoring threats of international criminal charges from the United Nations. At the same time, unknown even to his teammates, Reed was secretly plotting to retrieve Doom from Hell and place him in a specially prepared other-dimensional prison from which he could never escape; but this transfer was unwittingly interrupted by the rest of the Fantastic Four, allowing Doom to escape long enough to kill the Thing.

### Enslavement

When Dracula decided to make Sue his bride and Queen, Reed was unaware his wife was falling under the sway of the King of the Undead. Upon the 3rd day of Vlad, the nosferatu decided to enslave the scientist to use his knowledge and abilities to his advantages. Partially thanks to a device created by The Wizard, which prevented Reed's body from becoming elastic and malleable, Dracula was able to bite him and partially feed on his blood. Learning from previous encounters with slaves, Vlad decided to enforce his enslavement by adding on mesmerism to his bites.

Reed's first assignment from his new master was to construct device by which "milk" Ben, Johnny, and himself of their blood. When he was finished, the scientist was able to convince them to enter the machine.