This one requires some background. Waaaay back when, Ben went with Reed and Johnny to Battleword to fight in the Secret War. Ben stayed behind when everyone else left to find himself. What he found was the planet conformed to people's desires, so he managed to find himself a red-haired warrior woman to be his companion. She ceased to exist when the world blew up. (I've been walked out on before, but that one would be kind of hard to fault I guess...)

Anyways, Ben gets back to Earth and eventually sees an ad depicting a woman that looks a lot like his fantasy gal, so he goes and tracks her down. This gal turns out to be Sharon Ventura, who gets super strength from the Power Broker and starts calling herself Ms. Marvel. (Ms. Marvel, meanwhile, was busy being Binary so no one cared.) Ventura warms to Ben eventually and joins the Fantastic Four when he asks her to join after Reed and Sue decide to conquer suburbia (scarier than the Negative Zone!) and leave Ben leader. That brings us up to issue 310 here.

Ben and Shary are running away from an Arab who stuck his finger in an electric socket and can beam himself into Star Wars satellites and make them blow up the earth. For some reason, Ben thinks it's a really good idea to hijack a space shuttle and zip up to said satellites, whereupon Fasaud, that electric Arab we mentioned, zips into them and blows up Ben and Shary as a prelude to earth. Speaking of the earth, Ben and Shary fall back to it pretty quickly, getting bombarded by those trusty cosmic rays the entire time, leaving Ben transformed into a spikey Thing and Shary transformed into a lumpy Thing. She-Thing. Whatever.

The ramifications of this were never really explored. Several things are certain. Being bombarded by a certain frequency of cosmic rays when your shielding is gone will give you fantastic powers. Everyone who has tried it so far has not only lived, but gained fantastic powers. However, up until this point, they all gained different fantastic powers, varying, one assumes, upon the intensity of said rays, your genetic make-up, and probably what you ate for lunch and the depreciation of currency in Hong Kong. However (again), Shary gains the same powers as Ben, indicating that it is statistically more likely that if bombarded by cosmic rays at said frequency in your space shuttle, that you are most likely to become orange, made of rocks, and able to toss tall buildings in a single bound. So next time you kick a rock, be prepared for revenge.

Life is hard for Ben Grimm. No one denies that. Adjusting to a life of three fingered hands and blue shorts is bound to be hard on anyone. However, casting a woman into the same position is NOT the way to explore Ben's problems in a new way. This ridiculous concept deserves nothing less than our contempt!

Walt Simonson had the right idea when he did what he could with this plot and had Doctor Doom cure Sharon in return for information. That Tom DeFalco saw the need to revert Sharon to her former state is ridiculous on the face of it, and that she's still around somewhere, roaming the earth as a mishappen creature, is even worse.