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| Born on Yancy Street in New York City's Lower East Side, to a Jewish family, Benjamin Jacob Grimm had an early life that was one of poverty and hardship, shaping young Grimm into a tough, streetwise scrapper. His older brother Daniel, whom Ben idolised, was killed in a street gang fight when Ben was eight years old. Following the death of his parents, Ben was raised by his Uncle Jake and Aunt Petunia. |
| Excelling in football as a high school student, Ben received a full scholarship to Empire State University, where he first meets his eventual life-long friend in a teenaged genius named Reed Richards, as well as future enemy Victor von Doom. Despite them being from radically different backgrounds, science student Richards described his dream to Grimm to one day build a space rocket to explore the regions of space around Mars, and Grimm jokingly agreed to fly that rocket when that day came. After finishing college, having earned multiple advanced degrees in engineering, Grimm joined the United States Marine Corps, where he was trained as a test pilot. |
| Some years later, Reed Richards, now a successful scientist, once again made contact with Grimm. Richards had built his spaceship, and reminded Grimm of his promise to fly the ship. After the government denied him permission to fly the spaceship himself, Richards plotted a clandestine flight piloted by Grimm and accompanied by his future wife Susan Storm, who had helped provide funding for the rocket, and her brother Johnny Storm, who helped the group gain access to the launch system. Although reluctant to fly the rocket, Ben was persuaded to do so by Sue, for whom he had a soft spot. During this unauthorised ride into the upper atmosphere of Earth and the Van Allen Belts, they were pelted by a cosmic ray storm and exposed to radiation against which the ship's shields were no protection. Upon crashing down to Earth, each of the four learned that they had developed fantastic superhuman abilities. Grimm's skin was transformed into a thick, lumpy orange hide, which gradually evolved into his now familiar craggy covering of large rocky plates. Richards proposes the quartet band together to use their new abilities for the betterment of humanity, and Grimm, in a moment of self-pity, adopted the super-heroic sobriquet, The Thing. |
| When Skadi freed the Serpent an enigmatic being claiming to be the true all-father of Asgard, he called the Hammers of the Worthy to Earth. One of these hammers landed in Yancy Street, the old neighbourhood of Ben Grimm. In the middle of examining it, Reed Richards asked the Thing to try and lift it, resulting in his transformation into Angrir, Breaker of Souls. |
