Marvel Comics, for some reason, made a major change to its X-Force title in 2001. Instead of having a more pro-active mutant team that used to be the New Mutants, it was without much warning changed to a completely new group that were reality TV stars, mutants who were celebrities and saved the day for profit. Writer Peter Milligan and artist Mike Allred made for a major shift in what the X-Force team could do.
They were, well, probably forgettable mutants that could be killed off at any time. Except for, well, Doop.
Who or what was Doop? Well, he was a mutant…probably. He looked like a large, green, floating potato with a pair of heavy lidded, large eyes, a large mouth, a pair of skinny arms, and an “X” on his belly. He was originally set up as the team cameraman for the new X-Force, later renamed X-Statix because, well, that was a better name for that team if you ask me and someone might have. He spoke in a language called “doopspeak” which had its own font and was never translated though other characters easily understood him. He floated around, appeared to have some control over his general shape and…
You know, I have no idea what his powers are. He just…did stuff. One time in a silent issue for a month when Marvel insisted everyone do a silent issue, he broke a pimple on his head and sucked the rest of the team into some sort of weird mental landscape inside his mind. But another time, a mutant try-out who was out of control had to be taken care of, and Doop did. Did he use some sort of awesome powers? Nope. He used a hand ax at a campsite.
How old was Doop? Well, he apparently was a longtime friend of Wolverine. You know, the kind he never saw fit to mention for one reason or another.
And in another story where his brain exploded and he apparently had to work off the back-up brain in his butt until his original brain could be put back (during which he could speak English), X-Statix got into a fight with the Avengers, and Doop actually fought Thor to a standstill.
Apparently, he got his best attack in when he swallowed Mjolinir and then spit it back at Thor along with a bunch of copies.
See? Weird stuff.
Now, Doop was killed with the rest of his reality show team in the final issue of that series, but given his body seems to be made of Play-Doh, he didn’t stay dead, getting a mini-series here and there, attracting members of both sexes to his…awesome physique? Wolverine made him part of the faculty for the Jean Grey School when Logan was running the place, and that apparently meant Doop went out and took care of problems before they came to the school as often as he could.
It seems that as he originally appeared on a team full of celebrity mutants (the idea being even racists appreciate athletic performances from all kinds of people…not a bad concept actually), that Doop was supposedly the most popular. Here’s all I know about Doop in a nutshell: he was really freakin’ weird.
And I am only 90% sure he was a he.
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