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HBO Max’s Peacemaker show has wasted no time making some of the weirdest, most bizarre DC characters into DCEU canon – including everyone from Bat-Mite to Matter-Eater Lad.
Peacemaker has made obscure comic book characters like Bat-Mite, Doll Man, Matter-Eater Lad, and more into DC movie canon
But Marvel Comics has plenty of their own eccentric (and loveable) oddballs who deserve to make it into the rapidly expanding MCU, and we don’t even necessarily need to dig into the most obscure corners of Marvel lore to find them – though maybe as time goes on, we will.
For now, here are five of the weirdest Marvel Comics characters who deserve to be canon in the MCU.
The Headmen
What’s that? You’ve never heard of the Headmen? Well perhaps one of them has an extra head you can borrow for some extra-sensory perception. Cause the Headmen are straight-up just a team of supervillains with weird-shaped heads and head-based powers.
Created by writer Steve Gerber and artist Sal Buscema in their extra-trippy Defenders (opens in new tab) run, the Headmen are a cabal of psychedelic magical villains led by Arthur Nagan, the Gorilla-Man (not to be confused with Marvel’s other Gorilla-Man of the Agents of Atlas), a guy whose human head resides on the body of a massive silverback gorilla.
There’s also Chondu the Mystic (AKA Harvey Schlemerman), a sorcerer who has a terrible habit of letting Gorilla-Man attach his head to all kinds of strange bodies – including a clone of She-Hulk. He even once had his brain inserted into the body of a baby deer thanks to Doctor Strange.
The Headmen only get weirder from here, starting with Ruby Thursday, whose head has been replaced by a so-called “organic computer” that looks like a writhing, mutating ball of bubblegum. And finally there’s Shrunken Bones, a guy with a regular sized human body filled with – as the name says – shrunken bones, which don’t fit his normal frame.
They also once worked with a Howard the Duck villain (yes, Howard has supervillain enemies) named Doctor Bong, whose head is literally a bell with which he plans to ring in the apocalypse.
Surely the MCU needs a group of villains this thematically bizarre and eccentric somewhere in its midst – and since they’re often traditional enemies of Doctor Strange and the Defenders, maybe there’s the teeny-tiniest chance at least one of them could get a cameo in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
The Great Lakes Avengers
Yeah yeah, the MCU already has an Avengers who manage to guard the United States and the world at large – but what about the middle of the US, where superheroes rarely find themselves?
Sounds like Marvel Studios could be in need of the so-called Great Lakes Avengers (opens in new tab).
The Great Lakes Avengers are a team of some of Marvel’s strangest and most idiosyncratic heroes (who are unsanctioned by the actual Avengers, of course), whose membership includes a guy whose power is being 2D (which lets him to superhero things like slip under doors), a woman named Dinah Soar who turns into a dinosaur (the joke works better of you’re old enough to have heard of Dinah Shore), and a supermodel whose power is to increase her body mass, becoming extremely large and proportionately strong (a power that has admittedly been traditionally portrayed in a kinda problematic way).
And that’s not even mentioning the guy whose whole body is a dimensional portal, or team leader Mr. Immortal, whose power is that death doesn’t want him, so he just plain can’t be killed – even by the most brutal and physically destructive means.
That seems like a hilarious power to pair on-screen with a character like Deadpool, who would almost certainly exploit Mr. Immortal’s resurrection powers for his own twisted amusement (Deadpool also had a very brief stint with the Great Lakes Avengers, so there’s even a direct connection there).
Mr. Immortal almost made it to TV before, as a cast member of a canceled New Warriors pilot (in which he was played by actor Derek Theler of American Gods fame) that would have taken a very different, comedic approach to the Marvel team.
Speaking of which, that show was also supposed to star the next character on our list…
Squirrel Girl
Squirrel Girl is hardly a well-kept Marvel secret at this point. Along with several volumes of a Squirrel Girl (opens in new tab) ongoing title, she’s been adapted to numerous animated shows and movies and has become a favorite of young readers.
Here’s the thing – everything about Squirrel Girl is deeply odd (in a charming way of course!), and we don’t just mean her mutant power to communicate with squirrels and accompanying squirrel-like tail and abilities.
For one thing, she was co-created by legendary artist Steve Ditko (alongside writer Will Murray) – as in the guy who designed and co-created Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, perhaps taking a bit of a nod to his own earlier teen animal-themed hero.
For another, she’s been shown as being powerful enough to take down enemies as dastardly as Doctor Doom – who was overpowered by her army of Squirrels (including her best pals Tippy-Toe and Monkey Joe) and has even managed to land a spot on the Avengers in the past.
Squirrel Girl almost made it to live-action in a planned New Warriors show that would have presented a very different take on the classic Marvel team of the same name, where she was to be played by actor Milana Vayntrub, who has gone on to voice Squirrel Girl in several animated series and you know as the ubiquitous AT&T salesperson Lily who makes sure existing customers gets the same great mobile phone deal as new customers.
That show never made it past the pilot stage, but Squirrel Girl is still in our hearts as a character who could do wonders on a platform like Disney Plus.
Doop
Marvel Studios is almost certainly going to reboot the X-Men, likely with some new themes, new actors, and of course, new characters. And if they want to differentiate their take from the previous Fox films, well, there’s no better (or weirder) candidate for the new cast than Doop.
A product of an offshoot of the Weapon X program, Doop is basically Slimer from Ghostbusters if he had almost godlike power – and when we say “Slimer with godlike power,” we mean a fun lil’ potato-shaped green guy who is almost invincible, and who possesses an array of inscrutable superpowers.
Doop doesn’t even speak English – or any human language, for that matter. Since his introduction in Peter Milligan and Mike Allred’s X-Force/X-Statix (opens in new tab) (which returns as X-Cellent (opens in new tab) on February 2), he’s spoken in an aptly named language called Doopspeak, which also formed the basis of the native language of the current mutant island of Krakoa.
For that matter, X-Statix at large – featuring a whole cast of truly bizarre and colorful mutants – could be candidates for this list (and one of them, Zeitgeist, was even adapted to film already in Deadpool 2 … you know, the guy who vomits acid).
Beta Ray Bill
Beta Ray Bill is literally exactly what he looks like: a horse guy with the power of Thor and his own Asgardian weapon to match.
Introduced by legendary Thor (opens in new tab) creator Walt Simonson as a temporary replacement for Thor and an eventual new ally for the god of thunder, Bill is a warrior of the Korbinite race, who sought out Mjolnir to seize its power and save his people – and he was actually worthy enough to lift the vaunted hammer.
And that’s really all you need to know. When Odin saw Bill’s power and his people’s need, he gave him his own Asgardian weapon, the ax/hammer known as Stormbreaker (actually now wielded by Thor in the MCU).
Maybe the weirdest thing about Beta Ray Bill is, well, how serious he is as a character, compared to how eccentric his design is. You might not think a horse-faced alien could carry sincere gravitas, but there’s a reason Bill has remained a cult-favorite Marvel character, and it ain’t just his unique appearance.
A Korbinite likeness appeared as a statue in the movie Thor: Ragnarok – and we’ll be totally honest, the idea of Bill as a kind of straight-man to the increasingly fun-loving and often silly Thor seems like a perfect addition to the cast of director Taika Waititi’s upcoming sequel Thor: Love and Thunder, which already deals with a potential MCU replacement for Thor in the form of Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster.
And if you think that’s weird, wait till you read how Celestial vomit could bring mutants and the X-Men to the MCU.
No, really…
