Subject: Mr. Fantastic (Reed Richards)

One of the bravest adventurers and most brilliant scientific minds of his generation, Reed Richards was born to Evelyn Richards and her husband Nathaniel, a scientific genius whose inventions and discoveries made their family quite wealthy. Evelyn died when Reed was only seven, and Nathaniel was left to raise Reed on his own, nurturing the boy's obvious intellectual prowess and seeing to his education. Taking college-level courses at age 14, Reed attended four different universities, earning various degrees before he was out of his teens and studying under distinguished mentors such as Noah Baxter, Harmon Furmintz and Roderick van Nuys.

When the huge energy-absorbing alien Gormuu sought to conquer Earth, Reed outwitted and destroyed the entity. Partly in response to this incident, government funding for Reed's starship project was cut. By this time, Reed's father Nathaniel had disappeared, having secretly embarked on an attempted time travel journey that took him to the alternate world Other Earth, where he resided for years. Nathaniel had left Reed two billion dollars to fund his work, but the withdrawal of government backing still threatened to kill his starship project. After the Gormuu incident, Reed was more determined than ever to further the advance of space technology, and he convinced a reluctant Ben to help him make a test flight before their project could be shut down. Sue and Johnny Storm insisted on sharing the risk with them and came along for the ride. The quartet successfully launched into space, but intense cosmic rays penetrated the ship's shielding and irradiated the crew, forcing them back to Earth. Once there, the quartet discovered that the cosmic rays had mutated them into superhumans, with Reed gaining stretching powers. As Mister Fantastic, leader of the resultant Fantastic Four, Reed used his scientific genius, remaining family fortune and the income from his patents to fund and equip the new team, establishing their high-tech headquarters in the Baxter Building.

Powers
Mister Fantastic can shift his body (or portions of same) into a super-malleable state, enabling him to stretch, compress, expand, deform, elongate, contract or otherwise reshape his physical form at will. He can stretch his limbs, neck and torso to incredible lengths, though extending himself beyond approximately 1500 feet is a serious physical strain. When assuming non-humanoid shapes, he tends to favor simple constructs such as barricades, canopies, cylinders, cubes, nets, parachutes and spheres, generally assuming a volume of no greater than 1.7 cubic feet (though he can expand far beyond that volume if the shape he forms is thin-shelled and hollow). He can render himself paper-thin, or become slim enough in diameter to thread the eye of a needle. His malleable form renders him relatively immune to most conventional impacts; for instance, bullets fired into his body tend to bounce back at the shooter, and he can bodily contain small explosions. It is almost impossible to lacerate or puncture his skin unless he consciously allows such penetrations. By reshaping his features, Reed can disguise himself at will.