Fantastic Four #271 Oct 1984
"Happy Birthday, Darling!"
The Fantastic Four, Alicia, Franklin and Wyatt Wingfoot have surprised their leader Reed Richards with a birthday cake.
Reed is genuinely surprised as his birthday managed to slip his mind.

With many candles on the cake, Reed decides to delight Franklin by using his powers to expand his lungs
to comic proportions allowing him to generate the gust of breath needed to blow out all the candles.
Once the festivities being, Sue begins to notice that something is troubling Reed.
Confirming her feelings, Reed takes his wife outside and makes an admission to her: he cannot remember his mother's eyes.
Reed explains that while they were exploring the Negative Zone and he was made a prisoner of Taranith Gestal,
who absorbed Reed's mind into an entire machine, he has realized that since being restored to normal there are gaps in his memories.
As Reed tries to struggle to remember these missing memories, he tells his wife that the earliest thing he can recall
is a few years before they became the Fantastic Four when they battled the being known as Gormuu....

Years ago, a much younger Reed Richards is driving through Central City,
glad that his lover Susan Storm had decided to come out and visit him.
As they are driving, they witness as a strange alien ship passes by their car.
Driving to the landing site they are shocked to discover a horrible looking alien creature emerging from the ship.
It introduces itself as Gormuu, the warlord of the planet Kraalo.
When Reed questions the alien's purpose on Earth, Gormuu explains that he has come to Earth to conquer it.
As Reed pleads to the alien visitor not to do so, it merely brushes off his pleas and walks away, growing with every step.
Soon the United States Air Force is deployed, but their weapons have no effect on Gormuu, who continues to grow and become stronger.

Meanwhile, Reed is meeting with military officials to brainstorm on ways to stop Gormuu and his invasion of Earth.
When reports that the creature is approaching Central City, an evacuation is ordered.
When the general contacts the White House for assistance, the President tries to contact the Russians
to get permission to launch nuclear weapons at the monster without any retaliation.
The Russian premiere warns the President against such an action as it might be seen as an act of war.
With the governments of the world locked in their nuclear rhetoric, Reed decides to try something out.
Racing out to Gormuu's ship, Reed goes inside to investigate.
There he discovers the device that is constantly pumping Gormuu with energy causing him to grow.
Going out to investigate the footprints and measuring the deepness of the footprints, Reed finally has the solution he is looking for.

Rushing back to the Richards Rocket Group facility, Reed begins building a device that will bombard Gormuu with more power.
As he is working he is joined by both Sue and Ben Grimm.
When Reed tells them what he is up to, Ben believes that Reed is betraying them to Gormuu and tries to stop him.
Reed is forced to punch out his best friend then activates the device.
When the beam from the device begin to strike Gormuu, he suddenly shoots up in size.
The alien invader initially gloats, but when he cannot stop growing he begins to panic
as suddenly Gormuu's body grows larger than the planet itself, loses all cohesion and fades away.
In the aftermath of the invasion, Reed explains that he discovered that while Gormuu's body increased in size, it did not increase in mass.
That by increasing Gormuu's size to an exponential level it would cause him to dissipate.
With the threat neutralized, Reed takes Sue and Ben outside where his new experimental space craft is in its final stages,
telling his two closest friends that today's attack make their future space flight all the more important...

... Finishing his recollection, Reed comments how they went on their unauthorized space flight
not long thereafter which resulted in their exposure to cosmic rays and becoming the Fantastic Four.

Putting aside the conundrum for a time, Reed decides to make an announcement to the rest of the team:
They are returning to Central City and the Richards family home so that Reed can finally close any gaps he still has in his memory.
They soon arrive at the Richards estate where Reed is reunited with Giles Peacock
and his wife, the on site staff that has worked for the Richards family for years.

After a round of introductions are made, the Fantastic Four and their friends all sit down to dinner.
There, Reed explains that his father disappeared three years prior to the space mission that gained the Fantastic Four their powers.
Reed's father had left him a few million dollars for his project.
When Wyatt asks about how Reed still has this estate considering the Fantastic Four's early financial woes,
Reed points out that his father maintained separate ownership of the home from Reed,
and that it had enough funds to be maintained and operated by the Peacocks in his absence.

Giles tells Reed that things have been going smoothly with the exception of the occasional ghosts that appear in the night.
He tells the Fantastic Four that they have been regularly visited by strange specters that periodically emerge from the lab owned by Reed's father.
Curious as to what these ghosts might be, Reed and the rest of his team go down to the lab.
He stops She-Hulk before she can smash the door open, warning about traps.
Instead, Reed has Sue use her powers to make the wall transparent so Reed can spot the triggers
and has Johnny uses his flame powers to melt through them, deactivating the traps.

Getting into the lab, they are all shocked to see a massive time platform just like
the one the Fantastic Four confiscated from Doctor Doom early on in their career.
Examining the controls, Reed sees that it was set for yesterdays date and realizes that his father had traveled back in time to try
to get to this point in history and something must have happened along the way and ended up strapped in a parallel universe.
Reed tells his friends and family that there is but only one course of action: use the time platform and try to find his father.

Story & art by John Byrne.