Reed Richards is heading up a project to visit an anomaly just outside our solar system. His lifelong friend Ben Grimm is around to help with the test pilot work, and his girlfriend Sue Storm runs the company funding the project. Her brother Johnny is in charge of Storm Casinos, and he comes to get a piece of the ship as a promotional object. However, the project is interrupted when Wyatt Wingfoot, an agent of Victor Von Doom, arrives to take over and destroy the anomaly. The four manage to take a second prototype, and fail to prevent Doom's plan from running to completion, though they do succeed in getting accidentally exposed to enough cosmic radiation to change them forever.