Bull Brogin was arrested for beating up six husky longshoremen who wouldn’t join his protection racket and was sentenced to jail before Doctor Doom paid his bail and offered him a place in his plan to defeat the Fantastic Four. Doom used his XZ-12 treatment to transform Brogin and two other criminals into super humans to fight his enemies. The treatment exaggerated Brogin’s already impressive strength, multiplying it by a dozen, so that Doom could set him against the Thing.

Brogin later sent a note to the Thing, pretending to be a member of the Yancy Street Gang, inquiring where he purchased his “ugly pills.” Ben became incensed and came to Yancy Street to settle with the letter-writer, but Brogin tricked him and attacked him. But his strength was not enough to best the Thing, and so he used a Cosmic-Beam Gun that Doom had given him to temporarily turn off the Thing’s powers. Once he was Ben Grimm again, Brogin was able to knock him out with a punch and kidnap him to bring back to Doctor Doom.

Once there, however, Doom rewarded Brogin and his two fellow criminals by giving them each a priceless dimensional-transport machine in the shape of a plain box, telling them it was their payment. When they opened it, the machine transported each to another dimension where they would wait until their master needed them again.