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The moment of Reed's recognition is an iconic one for the duo.Īs for Victor, he immediately focused (some would say "fixated") on Reed himself, paying little attention to the other three team members in his second outing as Reed's "nemesis" he kidnapped Reed himself from the office of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby-the Fantastic Four comic's early conceit was that Lee and Kirby were simply chronicling the team's exploits-and swapped bodies with Reed using a technique he had used from an alien race called "the Ovoids." In the years that followed, he alternated between menace and ally, at one point luring the Four to a gathering at the Latverian Embassy where he used a hallucinogenic cocktail to turn them against each other. Shortly after Reed had formed his small family into a super-powered team known as The Fantastic Four, Victor put in an appearance to kidnap his fiancée Sue, and Reed's immediately recognized Victor's voice, even with the distortion of the metal mask, the passage of time, and Victor's injuries. Their differences are almost archetypal, but they are both utopians at heart. Their outer aspects finally showed the ideological differences between them both: Victor, seeing authoritarian control as the only way to ensure prosperity for humankind, and Reed, whose approach focused more on sharing knowledge and resources.
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In the brief trip to outer space, Reed and his companions were bombarded with cosmic radiation that altered their cells-in Reed's case, giving him tremendous physical elasticity that contrasts sharply with Victor's suits of rigid metal. Meanwhile, back in the States, Reed Richards, along with his fiancée Sue Storm, her younger brother Johnny, and his best friend from college, Benjamin Grimm, embarked on their own journey via a rocket of Reed's design, stolen from the US government and launched without authorization after their formal project was cancelled. Though under Doom's rule, "freedom" always came at the price of ultimate loyalty to him. Studying with a hidden monastic order in the Himalayan mountains, he shed his old identity and began building on his first suit of mystically-enhanced high-tech armor, the ultimate synthesis of his duel fields of study, finally emerging as "Doctor Doom," the man who would lead his home country of Latveria-in Eastern Europe-and his people, the Zefiro Romani of the region-to freedom. When Victor left school after the accident, Reed assumed that he must have died there was no record of his old friend anywhere in the world largely because Victor had, in many ways, left it behind. Victor, for reasons never fully explained, blames Reed for it all. When the machine was tested, it exploded, nearly killing the student who had been his assistant and leaving Victor's face badly scarred. His concern was with Victor's math, which contained a single, glaring error that Victor, in either haste or in hubris, had not caught.Ĭonfronted by Victor while in the act of trespassing on his dorm room, Reed tried to warn him of the mistake, but Victor was too angry to listen.
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Reed was not troubled by the machine's intended purpose, though he stated he did not believe communication with the dead was possible. Through it all, Reed continued to track Victor's progress and checked in on him when he could, eventually leading to the discovery of formulae relating to Victor's invention-a machine for communicating with the dead-in his dorm room. Friction between the three often exploded into minor acts of petty revenge and vandalism. That only seemed to make Victor more paranoid and guarded, especially when Reed brought his friend Ben Grimm along. Though they did not share a dorm room together as Reed initially requested, they did share lab space at Empire State and Reed often expressed his interest and curiosity in Victor's work. Frequently, chess was used in an attempt to bridge the gap between them, but even that only seemed to highlight the differences instead what Reed considered a pleasant mental exercise, Victor seemed to view as a deadly competition to be won at all costs. Reed, the more outgoing of the two from the beginning, introduced himself and tried to engage Victor, with whom he felt an immediate kinship, later describing their meeting as a "gift." He continued trying to befriend Von Doom throughout their time together at ESU even though Victor rarely seemed to respond in kind. Reed and Victor first met at Empire State University, where they attended together as scholarship students.