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Real Name: Reed Richards Occupation: Scientist, adventurer  Identity: Publicly known Legal Status: Citizen of the United States with no criminal record  Former Aliases: None Place of Birth: Central City, California  Marital Status: Married Known Relatives: Nathaniai (father), Evelyn (mother, deceased), Susan Storm (wife), Franklin (son), Johnny Storm (brother-inlaw), Cassandra (stepmother, deceased), Immortus (father's descendant, see Immortus, Kang, Rama-Tut). Group Affiliation: Fantastic Four Base of Operations: New York City First Appearance: FANTASTIC FOUR #1 History: Reed Richards, 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 Richards died when Reed was seven. Nathaniel Richards encouraged and guided young Reed in his scientific studies, and Reed was taking college-level courses by the time he was fourteen. Richards attended several universities, among them California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Harvard University, and State University in Hegeman, New York State.

While attending Columbia University, Richards rented living quarters at the Manhattan boarding house owned by the aunt of a young girl named Susan Storm. Though she was still only a child, no more than twelve years old, Susan fell in love with the older

Three years before Reed Richards tested his starship, his father mysteriously disappeared. In fact, Nathaniel Richards had devised a time machine which he had used to attempt to journey into the future. However, the machine actually transported him to an alternate Earth with a history considerably different from our own; Reed Richards would be reunited with him while visiting this alternate Earth years later. Richards recruited his old friend Ben Grimm, who had become a successful test pilot and astronaut, to pilot the starship. Richards was joined in California by Susan Storm, who was now an adult. Richards and Storm were engaged to be married.

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.

However, when the federal government threatened to withdraw its funding, Richards decided to

test fly it himself. Though Grimm warned that the ship's shielding might be inadequate, Grimm, Susan, and her adolescent brother Johnny all chose to go. They intended to travel through hyperspace to another solar system and back. However, unknown to Richards, a solar flare caused Earth's Van Allen radiation belts to be filled temporarily with unprecedented, ultra-high levels of cosmic radiation. The intense cosmic rays irradiated the four passengers and wrought havoc on the ship's controls. Grimm was forced to abort the flight and return to Earth.

Once back on Earth, the four passengers discovered that the cosmic radiation had triggered mutagenic changes in their bodies.

Richards convinced the others that the four of them should use their newfound 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. Richards moved into the Baxter building, purchasing it by profits from the patents of his inventions, and set it up as the Fantastic Four's headquarters and his scientific laboratory.
 

Due to his inventions and the constant adventuring of the Foursome, Reed found himself and the Fantastic Four instant celebrities. Eventually, Reed and Sue would be married in a ceremony attended by most of New York's superhuman champions. The two enjoyed a healthy marriage despite the Four's constant public scrutiny, for many years. However, the two fell into an estrangement at one point, with Sue dissatisfied with the public life as a superhero celebrity. She briefly left the team, and the Inhuman known as Medusa filled her spot on the team before Sue's return. When Sue became pregnant, she developed complications because of her unborn son's phenomenal power. Reed aided Sue by leading their teammates in recovering the Cosmic Control Rod from the extradimensional Annihilus, and Sue gave birth to Reed's son, Franklin.

Later, Sue became pregnant again, but the same complications arose due to the power of her unborn daughter, and she was delivered stillborn. (In reality, the cosmic powers of Franklin allowed the daughter to be reborn elsewhere in another reality, and she grew to become the girl known as Valeria von Doom.)
 

At another point, Reed and Sue announced they were leaving the Four to raise their son in relative normality. However, when Franklin was kidnapped by the villain Nanny and her Orphan-maker, Reed and Sue were drawn into adventuring alongside Captain America (then known as the Captain) and re-forming the hero team Avengers. Once the Avengers were re-established, Reed and Sue left that assemblage and returned to the Fantastic Four once again. Months later, the Fantastic Four's archenemy, Doctor Doom, lured a powerful alien entity to his nation of Latveria, coveting its power. Doom and the Fantastic Four faced down the alien, but Doom lay dying. Reed offered his aid, and Doom used the remaining power in his armor to disintegrate himself and his archenemy. Eventually, the team discovered that Reed and Doctor Doom did not die, but were snatched from their moment of death by the villain Hyperstorm. Reed had spent untold months in an underdeveloped and

underpopulated dimension, severly taxing his sanity. The Fantastic Four managed to recover Reed and defeat Hyperstorm before return to Earth. For a time, Reed allowed Sue to continue leading the team, believing he still needed to recover from his encounter with Hyperstorm.
 

Soon afterward, the Fantastic Four were caught up in a battle with the psychic being known as Onslaught. To defeat the villain, Reed led the active members of the Four in seemingly sacrificing themselves to contain its energies. As a result, the Fantastic Four were believed dead. In reality, the Fantastic Four were saved by Franklin, who through his reality-altering powers, bodily recreated them and others who died into an alternate dimension. Eventually, Franklin Richards was forced to bring his created

world into true reality, thus bringing his father and the other heroes back to Earth, whereupon Reed continued to lead the Fantastic Four.
 

More recently, the Four gained an ally in Valeria von Doom, believed at the time to be from another timeline and the daughter of Sue and Doctor Doom, which disturbed Sue. Nevertheless, after several weeks, Sue came to accept Valeria, and even allowed her to take Franklin off-planet as his guardian when Sue became convinced once again that Franklin would be more safe if reared separately from the activities of the Four. However, Franklin and Valeria were drawn alongside the Four during their battle with the cosmic entity Abraxas. Franklin combined his own cosmic powers with those of Valeria, nullifying the threat of Abraxas at the cost of burning out his powers and destroying Valeria's existence. As a part of this last cosmic feat, Franklin allowed Valeria to be reborn as a near-term fetus within Sue. Within weeks, Sue's pregnancy came to term, with similar problems as before. As Reed was captured at the time by the villains known as the Hidden Ones, Johnny sought

out the services of Doctor Doom, who, for purposes of his own, helped deliver Valeria.

Height: 6 ft. 1 in.
Weight: 180 lbs.
Eyes: Brown
Hair: Brown

Strength Level: Mister Fantastic possesses the normal human strength and build of a man of his age, height, and build who engages in moderate regular exercise.

Known Superhuman Powers: Mister Fantastic possesses the ability to convert the mass of his entire body into a highly malleable state at will. In such a state, he can stretch, deform, expand, or compress his entire body or parts thereof into any contiguous shape he can imagine. He can extend his limbs, torso, or neck to great distances: the maximum length he can distend before his body segments become painful is about 1,500 feet. (Although he can extend discrete body parts, such as a single finger, an ear, or an eye, he seldom if ever isolates such parts in his elongations.) He can also extend his body in two directions, creating a canopy, parachute, or sheath, its thickness determined by the extent of its distention. He has compressed his body into the shape of a solid sphere, a cylinder, a cube, a toroid, and a rectangular prism: he can assume the shape of any solid that he can envision clearly, of a volume no greater than 1.7 cubic feet (a sphere about 18 inches in diameter). He can generate thin-walled shapes that enclose great volumes of space. Mister Fantastic can flatten himself to the thickness of an average sheet of typing paper (.0035 inch) or narrow himself to a diameter small enough to pass through the eye of a #10 beading needle (about .045 x .06 inches). How his body's respiration and circulatory systems function at these distorted extremes is as yet unknown. Mister Fantastic can alter his form in a matter of seconds, often much less (depending on the complexity of the shape), and revert to his normal humanoid shape within a similar time. The greater the distance he stretches or the more extended the size of the object he becomes, the weaker his overall strength becomes.

Due to the great malleability and elasticity of his molecular structure, Mister Fantastic is able to absorb the impact of any type of man-made ballistic projectile by deforming his body along the path of the projectile's trajectory at the point of initial impact. After his body absorbs the kinetic energy of a ballistic projectile's impact, he can expel the object back along its trajectory by flexing like a trampoline if he is adequately braced. He can enclose and absorb the energy of a large explosive, on the order of 8 to 12 pounds of TNT (excluding exotic, high density explosives). Such shocks to his system are physically exhausting.

Mister Fantastic's transformation to a malleable state is reflexive and nearly instantaneous: if he was at his normal form and taken unaware by machine gun fire, his body would still absorb the bullets' impact through radical deformation. Mister Fantastic's skin is virtually impervious to laceration or punctures unless he wilfully relaxes his reflexive control over small areas of his body. In that case, scalpels and ordinary needles can penetrate his skin.