It is hard to put into words how much I despise Reed Richards, but it’s the point of this blog post so I’ll try my level best.
Where to start?
Well, apart from the fact I can’t even read the Wikipedia entry on the character without wishing he was real so I could punch him in his smug, elasticated face, I suppose it’s the complete lack of common sense. One of my major bugbears about him is the way in which he takes his best friend, girlfriend and girlfriend’s younger brother on an experimental star-ship into space just because the American government threatened to cut funding for the project. That’s the kind of total disregard for the safety of others you will hardly ever see in another character as it escalates within a single sentence. I mean, Batman may take teenage boys out onto the streets of Gotham to fight crime, but not because someone merely threatened to shoot his parents in front of him when he was eight. The man has standards.
What makes the entire situation even worse is that he knew damned well that the ship had not undertaken full safety testing and still took a sixteen year old boy out into space despite the (later completely vindicated) concerns Ben Grimm had about radiation.
Because God forbid Reed Richards doesn’t get his own way.
