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From SCIFIPEDIA
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Mister Fantastic (also called Mr. Fantastic) is a Marvel Comics superhero created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as part of the Fantastic Four comic book series. A genius in a variety of fields, Richards gained his superhuman ability to stretch and twist his body to extremes as a result of accidental exposure to cosmic radiation. He is the undisputed leader and father figure of the Fantastic Four, the superhero team that functions more like a family than a club or an organization. His wife Sue Richards (the Invisible Girl) is also a member of the team, as well as his best friend Ben Grimm (the Thing) and his young brother-in-law, Johnny Storm (the Human Torch). He and Sue have two children, Franklin and Valeria, and this odd extended family all live together in Manhattan in the building called Four Freedoms Plaza.
Reed is considered one of the world's foremost scientific minds. His greatest scientific accomplishment is the discovery of the Negative Zone, an anti-matter universe parallel to our own. He has also developed material made up of "unstable molecules", of which the Fantastic Four's uniforms are made. This amazing material stretches when Reed does, turns invisible when Sue does, and remains whole while Johnny's flames seem to go right through it.
Character Origin
Reed Richards was a child prodigy, the son of physicist Nathaniel Richards and his wife Evelyn. A child prodigy, Reed had special aptitude in the fields of Math, Physics, and Mechanics. He was attending college level courses by the time he was 14, he had attended several universities and earned a doctorate in physics and electrical engineering by the time he was 22. He was in the armed forces for six years, after which he designeed and managed a government rocket program independent of NASA, in his home town of Central City, California. In the original version of the story, the goal of the program was to launch the first people in space, though over the decades, when that goal became outmoded, the goal was said to be to create the first rocket to transcend the light barrier. Reed’s desperate moment came when his superiors told him he was too valuable to risk on the actual flight.
So determined was he to prove the spaceship completely safe, he took an unauthorized test flight in the ship with his best friend Ben Grimm as pilot, along with his fiancé Sue Storm and her younger brother Johnny along for the ride. An accident involving a solar flare resulted in the flights being exposed to an unpredicted amount of cosmic radiation, exposing the crew and the ship, and forcing Grimm to abort the mission and crash land the ship. Surviving the crash, the quartet found themselves gifted with incredible powers. Richards organized them into the team of adventurers called the Fantastic Four, funded largely by his own inventions and patents. Reed gained the ability to elongate his body at will.
Powers
Richards ability is to do more than simply “stretch”. He can convert his body to a malleable state at will, enabling him to expand, stretch, reform, or compress his body into almost any shape. He can extend his limbs, torso and neck to reach great distances, limited to about 1,500 feet before becoming painful. He can form his body into a working parachute, flatten himself to the thickness of typing paper, and slide his body under a door or through a small hole. He can survive the impact of bullets and other projectiles by expanding the part of his body impacted by the projectile along the line of its trajectory. He can do all this at incredible speed, so as to make his responses to seem almost reflexive.
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