In his plans to take over the world, the Puppet Master decides to test his ability to control people's mind using puppets made of special radioactive clay and attacks the Fantastic Four. When his blind step-daughter Alicia tries to talk him out of this madness, they start to struggle and he drops the puppet he made, causing him to fall to an apparent death through the window.
The Puppet Master has completely recovered from his fall and leaves the sanatorium to plot his revenge on the Fantastic Four. To defeat them, he decides to take control of the Sub-Mariner. He forces him to kidnap the Invisible Girl and to challenge the team to get her back. The conflict ends when an octopus hurled by Ben attacks the submarine of the Puppet Master who is force to release his control on Namor. He tries to carve a puppet of the creature, but is unable to take control of the mind of the mindless beast that is crushing his vessel.
The Puppet Master has managed to escape from Namor's deep-sea monster by using his submarine's jet to rise to more shallow waters where the creature could not survive. Later, to get revenge on the Fantastic Four, he forces the Human Torch to flirt his daughter so the Thing would get jealous and engage in a fight. The scheme works until he orders the Torch to fly through the exhaust of a flying jet, which causes the heat to backfire on the puppet and burn his hand. Alicia stops the Thing from finishing up her father who she says can no longer harm them.
Accepting the Mad Thinker's offer to team up to defeat their common enemies, the Puppet Master creates a puppet of Professor X to pit his X-Men against the Fantastic Four. During the battle, the Beast destroys the Puppet Master's clay replica of the professor, enabling him to mentally deactivate the Awesome Android. Against the combined efforts of the two teams, the Mad Thinker and the Puppet Master are forced to escape.
The Mad Thinker convinces the Puppet Master to team up with him and sculpt a puppet of the Thing to defeat the rest of the Fantastic Four. The first attempt fails when the Thing momentarily turns into human form. The second, when the radioactive puppet of the Thing backfires on the Puppet Master and knocks him out.
After surviving his last encounter with the Human Torch and the Thing, the Puppet Master undertook plastic surgery to avoid being recognized. Having realized that he discovered a way to transform living beings into statues, he decides to get revenge on the two heroes. He lures them into the sub-basement of an art exhibition and pits them against a machine able to hold the Thing and an Ice Queen that can freeze off the Torch's flame. But the heroes manage to set themselves free and surprise the Puppet Master who falls under his new device and turns into a statue.
On Reed Richards and Sue Storm's wedding day at Baxter Building, the Puppet Master falls under the control of Doctor Doom's Emotion Charger and tries to force a man to poison the Thing despite his decision to never attack the Fantastic Four again. While the battle rages on, Reed uses a machine that transports all their enemies back to the recent past with no memory of what occurred.
