Reed Richards Is Useless: Difference between revisions
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** The current justification, being used in Jonathan Hickman's run on [[Fantastic Four]] and F.F. and by Bendis in the [[Ultimate Marvel]] universe, is that it's his family which prevents Reed from putting all his efforts into changing the world. He has to choose between being a loving father and husband and devoting himself to advancing humanity. It's implied that the world is ''lucky'' when Reed takes the first option since, if he doesn't or if things don't work out between him and Sue, he becomes a [[Knight Templar]] (Hickman's books) or full on villain (the Ultimate 'verse).
*** There's also that Reed's kids will go on to become pivotal figures in history themselves, so it's to the net good of the timeline that Reed actually stop to raise some instead of being a full-time working bachelor.
** ''Reed Richard's Guide to Everything'', an RPG rulebook framed as a newspaper column where Reed Richards answers the questions posed by children, has Reed outright answer why he doesn't mass produce HERBIE. The first reason, that it would cost "the average household something like three years income" and hiring a talented human would be cheaper. This makes it worse since HERBIE is superhuman and would cost a business a one time payment of less (due to social security matches and lack of biological needs) than hiring an '''average''' human for three years. The second, and more credible, is that Reed has encounter plenty of supervillains who can hijack his robots and he doesn't want to give them any ammo. Doesn't exactly answer the question on less hijackable things however.
* [[Doctor Doom]] has a healing ray machine that can regenerate full-body third-degree-burn patients to full health in a day. Being the bad guy, he hasn't released it. But Reed hasn't even tried to duplicate or reverse-engineer that project...and Reed's had possession of Doom's castle at least twice since that story arc.
* [[Iron Man|Tony Stark]] is, depending on the invention, one of the more justified versions of the trope.
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