Not just Reed Richards. This applies to any superhero character with stretching powers; Ralph Dibny, Eel O’Brian, Helen Parr, Jake the Dog. (If you don’t recognize any of these names, this probably isn’t a thread for you.)
So we see these characters can stretch out a limb to great lengths. Let’s say a hundred feet away from their body. But when they do something like this, they can still hold their arm up off the ground and use it like a normal arm.
Leverage should be an issue. If you or I took a hundred foot long pole and tried to hold it straight out, we’d never be able to hold it up. Our muscles aren’t strong enough. But these characters all do it with ease.
Of course, super-strength is no problem. Lots of characters have super-strength in the genre. But if these stretching characters all have the super-strength needed to use their stretching powers the way they do, why don’t they ever use that super-strength in a way that’s not related to stretching? Why don’t we ever see them lifting up a car or punching through a wall?
Well, DC can just introduce a ‘Stretch Force’ and handwave away any problems.
But the way you lay it out in the OP, I’d have to say yes there is a degree of super strength. Now, I suppose you could say that as the arm elongates its proportional strength increases, but if that the case the shoulder would be massive as would the tendons holding everything in place. So yeah, super strength.
Plasticman seems to have unlimited ability to stretch his body, as if he could extend his arm all the way around the earth and pat his own back. Since his revival I don’t know how much of this has been explained.
Reed Richards has been portrayed inconsistently in the past, maybe some of this has been cleared up in the last 30 years. For instance he can coil his arms around some bad guy immobilizing him, no one was able to break out as far as I remember, but he doesn’t seem to be able to constrict his arms to apply any pressure. It isn’t clear if he will stretch or break under force, or if his mass increases as he grows larger, it’s not even clear that his volume actually increases as he stretches.
In the recent Avengers: Secret Wars cartoon they have Ms. Marvel wrestling with the Hulk and not having her butt handed to her. I personally thought that was a little too OP for the character but I have no idea what her official power level is.
This falls under the category of Required Secondary Power Required Secondary Powers - TV Tropes (the powers that make it possible to survive or use the marquee powers) - he’s superstrong, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to move his arm when it was stretched out a several dozen feet, but not super-strong compared to someone who’s marquee power strength.
This issue of strength and leverage is problematic. We don’t know what the density of his stretched arm is or how it changes. For instance, can he stretch his arm out so that it is of minimal density, lighter than tissue paper, maybe no heavier than air, and then once stretched throw a punch and have his hand and arm increase in density just before connecting with the bad guy’s chin? Can he change the volume of his arm as it stretches or does it just become flat or even hollow? That’s difficult to tell in 2D comic book art.
I remember a Justice League comic where Elongated Man manages to stop a frictionless (for reasons I forget) runaway train by essentially pulling it to a stop. That certainly takes some strength.
Well, strength is largely a component of muscle mass and the rigidity/elasticity of the muscles pulling against bone/tendon.
If Reed can control muscle mass, as well as the rigidity/elasticity, then yes, he would be able to have significantly more strength than a normal human. There’s a limit, there, someplace, but basically, it boils down to the Superman or Hulk rule - He’s precisely as strong as the storyline calls for
What about the Super-Skrull that had the powers of all four Fantastics, only better? He could stretch himself out one hundred miles. Imagine a cantilever that could hold a 100 mile beam straight? Wouldn’t that require more strength than the Hulk?
Not that we should argue physics about a character (Reed) whose brother-in-law could turn himself into fire, still have a human brain, and then revert himself into normal human form, even after reaching nova temperatures.
Well maybe, or maybe it’s just that physics doesn’t work the same way in comic book universes. Imagine the consternation of superheroes visiting our universe who find their superpowers no longer work, or worse Stretchyman can’t hold up his arm if he extends it more than a few feet from his shoulder.
It’s fun to play around with The Physics of Superheroes, but at some point you have to step back and say, “Well, Jack Cole invented the super-stretchy superhero when he came up with Plastic Man*, because it made for interesting drawings and concepts”, and realize that the ability didn’t stand up to a moment’s serious scrutiny. What allows him to extend his “plastic” arm? What keeps it in shape (let alone rigid?) How can he keep up those cantilevered limbs? How can his distorted muscles cause those stretched limbs to work?
It makes no real sense, but it let Cole draw his hero not only stretching outrageously (in some panels, he’s folding his face!) but also to form himself into object like a car or a blimp (which can actually roll along and fly, respectively).
What’s interesting is that while Ralph Dibny/The Elongated Lad (and other DC innovations, like Jimmy Olsen/Elastic Lad and Lois Lane/Elastic Lass) and Mr. Fantastic/Reed Richards could also stretch, they almost never made themselves into shapes like Plastic Man. (One bity that I loved in Frank Miller’s second Dark Knight series was the confrontation between Plastic Man and the Elongated Man – “You’re so boring! You never do any shapes!”)**
*After trying out the basic concept with his Chinese detective, Wun Kloo. And maybe others. See the book Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to their Limits by Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd
**To his credit, though, Jack Kirby still found interesting things for Reed to do with his stretchines, and he conveyed the feel that Reed was sort of made of rubber better than anyone else did. And Reed did sometimes do shapes – he made himself look like a manta ray to escape from Namor once, and another time made himself look like one of the Mole Man’s minions. Helen Parr of The Incredibles did shapes, too – a practical water raft, a practical parachute.
Originally, he was portrayed as stretchy, but otherwise normal. At some point, they started saying regular bullets could not penetrate his stretchy form. I’m not sure if he’s super strong or just able to get great leverage on heavy objects, but I’m inclined to go with “both.” Seems to me he’s lifted cars on occasion. If he lost his powers and was just the smartest man in the world, that would be a considerable power set.
He’s most famous for it, but he didn’t invent it. Plastic Man didn’t appear until 1941. Wun Cloo (spelled that way in the comics, even though some databases list him as Wun Kloo) was created by Gill Fox in 1939 but didn’t stretch until Cole took over the strip more than a year later.
Both, therefore, are preceded by Flexo the Rubber Man, script by Will Harr, art by Jack Binder, who first appeared in Mystic Comics #1, March 1940. He’s shown stretching his body and stopping a car with it.
