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Body Horror / Webcomics

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Examples of Body Horror in webcomics.

  • 8-Bit Theater has Red Mage getting raped by and transforming into what can only be described as a "hideous eye thing" and later having partial transformations as he tries to bend the laws of magic in order to hide the fact that he was still a monster.
  • This is Zexion's speciality in Ansem Retort. He put an Oreo in someone's brain to turn him into a human-cookie...thing just because he could.
  • In Abomination this happens a lot. as a Bendy and the Ink Machine comic, it deals with the kind of people being forcibly turned into cartoons. Most obviously shown for Joey Drew himself throughout the entire comic, with his hands melting upon contact with the Ink demon, a phenomenon he uses at the very end to complete a fusion with bendy into the Ink Demon seen in the game.
  • In Archipelago Riley, a half-wereshark, tries to transform even though his mixed heritage should prevent him from doing so. As he transforms his body rips open.
  • Avialae starts with Ordinary High-School Student Gannet finding out that he's suddenly begun growing wings from his back. It does NOT make for a pretty picture with copious bleeding and intense pain for him. This is thankfully limited to just the early stages, though; his wings keep growing, but they stop bleeding after the first day of growth unless they're improperly bound.
  • A constant in Awful Hospital, especially once you see the world beyond the Polyp.
    • It's later revealed that the Hospital is so alien that the very idea of a human is fundamentally incompatible with it, leading to their transformation into the creatures that Jay refers to as 'Slobs'. According to Doctor Man, Jaynote  is even of exceptional stability among humans 'admitted' to the Hospital.
  • Bad Faith revolves around a religious mother taking her obese son to a weight loss clinic as a desperate last attempt at getting him to lose weight, and she starts praying to a God (it's never really stated if the mother was a Christian or if it was a different God). After one week, her son suddenly loses 20 pounds, causing the doctors to assume that the mother is starving him (she denies it, and claims that her "God" is doing it). After the doctor looks at new scans of the boy, it's revealed that his fat is actually getting sucked in like a Capri-Sun, compressing his body cavity. Within 3 weeks, the boy is so emaciated that he implodes mid-scan.
  • Baskets of Guts has some really gruesome scenes. Especially those involving magic.
  • Poet of Bicycle Boy has been forced into a cyborg body, leaving only his head, some of his neck, and 3/4 of his torso in tact. Finding out why this happened, and what grievous injury he underwent to need such heavy bodily modifications, causes him some distress.
  • Blank It has little beyond Body Weirdness in Chapter 1, but in Chapter 2 it graduates to full-fledged horror.
  • Blood is Mine and its sequel My Delirium Alcazar basically run on this, from haphazard experiments with organ printers to world-eating meat gods and everything in between.
  • Mrs. Cho of The Bongcheon-Dong Ghost. Her body is not necessarily strange looking and retains human qualities. It's the fact that she is the reanimated corpse of a mentally unstable woman who committed suicide from jumping from her apartment window that enforces the horror. When Mrs. Cho hit the ground, every bone in her body retained damage of various levels. Some had small fractures but many were split in two. In addition, her forehead most likely hit the pavement but caused no damage to the skull. If that had happened, her head would be destroyed. This injury causes her head to retain its shape while covering it in blood. So to reiterate, she is a walking corpse who broke every bone in her body whose face is covered in blood. The real frightening aspects of the comic are two jump scares when Mrs. Cho turns her head 180 degrees around and runs faster than a cheetah on crack directly at the screen while unsettling noises of bones cracking are heard. Also, Mrs. Cho was a real person who committed suicide.
  • Charby the Vampirate: A changeling appears as a mess of organs and limbs mid-change as they wrap around and overcome the original owner of their new intended identity.
  • Coga Nito: Potentially with Pieces. The user's body physically turns into the Piece, along with anything they're wearing and any objects they're holding. They can also potentially take horrendous damage, as long as the head is unharmed.
  • Zenith's Tagged goons in Commander Kitty are stitched-together abominations made of kidnapped spacers. It's no wonder Nin Wah is scared stupid by the first sight of them.
  • Daughter of the Lilies
    • Drath hosts mutate hideously when initially possessed. When the fusion dance aspect of possession comes into play, it gets even worse, and apparently corpses are 'really' icky when drath'd.
    • The Drath themselves have their heads twisted backwards.
    • Professor Margot after she's hit in the face by acid from fighting Brody, though after she heals, she's happy to show off the scars.
  • In Deep Rise Surgery is a common skill among Nobles.
  • In Demon Eater, every time a demon eats another demon, the eater's body changes to take in some characteristics of the eaten demon. Demons can also shapeshift at will, but that has happened less often.
  • DICE: The Cube That Changes Everything: Byungchul's Data Ghost has the only upgrade he had, improved to match Dongtae's current strength, up to being able to make a spear and whip with own flesh.
  • Dominic Deegan shows how hazardous chaos can be to your body.
  • The Crax from The Dragon Doctors is basically magical cancer. With tentacles.
  • In Drowtales nether beings, at least the non-intelligent ver'aku, tend to do this to the fae they possess.
  • Vladia, (formerly Vlad) from El Goonish Shive is a shape shifter whose form was a mishmash of bats, birds, human, an alien race known as Uryuoms, and a freaking leopard, wouldn't change out of his/her animal form due it being excruciatingly painful, and potentially fatal to take on his/her human appearance. Even though we don't see the Body Horror, it's very much implied, considering the above and that this is her as a human and is her animal form.
  • Ennui GO!: While it shows up every now and then as a gag, when it's used for actual effect, it's very effective, with the most prominent case being Izzy's and Adelie's mother, who has multiple infected track marks in her elbows and neck, and some sort of injury on her right temple which has turned her right eye red and veiny.
  • False Positive played this painfully straight in its very first story arc.
  • Goblins:
    • Body horror is a possible random side effect triggered by the Shield of Wonder. Notable cases are the guard who was forcefully transformed into an ogre and cut down by his sergeant, and one who was painfully transformed into a swarm of snakes.
    • The finger horror spreads a disease called 'liquid rot' to any living thing it touches. The limbs of creatures affected by this disease will transform painfully, before falling off the body and turning into a liquid goop which the horror can feed upon.
      • And it won't even try to kill you quickly, either. It'll drag to its lair, infect you with the rot, and leave you to die a slow, agonizing death before feeding on the remains. As deaths by liquid rot go, this (spoilers) was relatively quick and clean. Says something about the setting, no?
  • Gnoph has a lot of this. When it begins, Abbey is being slowly eaten alive from the inside by her Bond Creature, Scut. Things get progressively worse from there.
  • Guilded Age has The Grove of Ur-Animals, which contains monsters that even the In Harmony with Nature wood elves won't go near. The nicest-looking is a giant gorilla, with eight arms arranged like spider legs and eyes to match.
  • In Homestuck, when each character enters the game the antagonists are "prototyped" with a new mutation. When Jack Noir kills the Black Queen and takes her magic ring, he loses an eye and an arm, grows a jester's hat, a cat face, tentacles, and wings, and then grows a sword through his chest. And that's just with three players in the game, there's still one more to come!
    • Jade's Kernel ended up being prototyped with Bec through a series of unfortunate events. We get to watch Jack transform into an almighty godlike being with unfathomable cosmic power.
    • The Troll session's version of the Black King is even worse. Because of the Trolls' prototyping choices, he has two heads, two sets of wings, tentacles, multiple eyes, arms and mouths, horns, claws, a centaur-like lower half with an udder, and a mustache on each head.
    • There's also the fate of Sollux's ancestor The Ψiioniic, who was forced to become a living battery for Her Imperious Condescension's starship. He doesn't look too comfortable.
    • For more prototyping goodness, there's the prototyping of Jane's sprite with Vriska and Tavros's corpses, resulting in a being that knows just how horrifically wrong it is, both physically and mentally. So much that Tavrisprite blows itself up a couple pages later.
      • This is also played straight with Erisolsprite, the combination of two trolls that nearly killed each other when they were alive. They're just stable enough to not share Tavrissprite's fate, but they're still in a constant state of self-loathing. However, Dirk's sprite averts it completely. Lil' Hal loves having a physical body, and Equius loves having a powerful robot brain. There's also Roxy's, who has so far been the speechless but seems to be quite fine with the combination of Nepeta and Feferi — justified in that the two components were the friendliest and most peaceful of their peers. Then Fefeta is literally torn apart from the conflicting emotions during an argument between Erisolsprite and Arquiusprite, playing the trope straight.
  • Downplayed in Jupiter-Men. When Quintin uses his powers, his stretched out bones can be seen through his goo body. It's not instantly horrific, but it can be mildly disconcerting. Jackie is also creeped out when Quintin stretches his neck to inhuman lengths to peer through a warehouse window.
  • The Kingfisher features a moderate amount of body horror, especially when new vampires are born, or when a vampire assumes the form of their death.
  • In one of the early Looking for Group comics, Richard cast a spell to create skeletons to fight on his side. Said skeletons were still in the bodies of his enemies, which the skeletons hastily extracted themselves from. Did I mention said enemies were still alive?
  • Mare Internum: First, Mike gets a compound fracture to his femur. Then said femur gets some weird parasitic growth that appears to have a mind of its own. Now there's something on Mike's face... something that seems to be living, and stuck.
  • MSF High: The Legion, at least to unwilling targets (read: genocidal Knight Templars).
  • In the Order of the Stick prequel volume Start Of Darkness, Xykon rips away his own flesh as he is transformed into a lich.
  • In Pacificators, this is Nozomi's preferred method of attacks. She uses her powers to do things such as: tearing a man's heart in half, sucking the air out of another man's lungs, and her special favorite, bursting a man's testicles.
  • Paranatural: One of the supernatural creatures in Max's house is a floating left hand named Lefty. Max initially assumes he's just a hand-shaped spirit, as spirits are living creatures that are simply born Invisible to Normals, and tend to be pretty weird. Lefty proves he's an actual ghost (the remnant of a dead human) by showing Max his severed wrist.
    Max: Oh my. Them's tendons.
  • Used comedically in Questionable Content when a botched Firmware update causes Momo to start sprouting extra fingers and feet. Later on, Pintsize downloads the same update, with sickening results. Unfortunately for him, the rest of the cast is unfazed.
  • Raven's Dojo has lots of examples of this, the latest one being the Omega Dog.
  • Every single character in Ruby Quest. (Minus Bella, that is) Some of them aren't particularly obvious — Red, for instance, looks perfectly normal in his first appearance. Then he laughs. Others, though, are so twisted you can barely tell what they once were, including Stiches and Number Six. Oh, dear god, Number Six...
  • Slightly Damned
  • In Stand Still, Stay Silent the way Rash victim's bodies transformed into trolls is... squicky. Especially after you realize that trolls and giants are made of people and suddenly you see body parts all over them...
  • String Theory (2009): The last three panels of this page.
  • Played in disturbingly realistic fashion in Sunstone when we're shown the dangers of careless rope work in self-bondage. Marion uses the wrong sort of knots on her wrists combined with improper positioning of the ropes on the bed out of obsession with trying to prove Alan wrong about 24/7 submission (which Alan isn't into for a variety of reasons, chief among them being that it is highly stressful for the dom) and finds herself trapped and alone while the blood circulation to her hands is cut off. Her hands go lifeless and visibly dark grey in color. It gets worse when we're told this had caused blood clots and Marion could have lost her hands.
    • And it gets even worse with the realization that had Ally not known to keep the ropes on her despite Marion's desperate pleas to take them off, Marion could very well have died — if those clots had been allowed to run loose in the rest of her bloodstream, the most probable result would have been a heart attack or a brain embolism, depending on which major organ the clots got to first.
  • Trevor (2020) is a font of examples. To list a few:
    • Trevor's skin appears to be the slowest part of him to shift shape, causing it to tear repeatedly when he's on the move.
    • He keeps forming extra limbs that end in sharp, blade-like bones.
    • When on the hunt, his body morphs almost constantly, seemingly of its own volition, into various inhuman shapes and body parts, as well as growing extra appendages.
  • Unsounded:
    • Duane's condition as a walking corpse is somewhat stabilized by the time of the story, despite the bugs crawling through him, but we get lovely flashback shots of him suffocating on his own congealing blood and his skin sloughing away as maggots eat away at him. His Horror Hunger caused him to take bites of his own rotting maggoty flesh.
    • The Silver Eel is made up of spindly thorny silver, and the bad memories and mangled bodies of its human victims.
    • Toby is already dead when it happens but the First Silver Weapon digs into him with twisting thorny vines that pull him up and reanimate him, with tendrils forcing their way out of his eye sockets as the Silver puppets him to attack his friends.
    • After his chest is crushed and he's already dying Elan gets core leached by Keon, a method of killing or getting rid of evidence by removing a vital aspect of a material so that the khert destroys the whole thing, pulling it apart and into itself. It is a slow and painful death.
    • Lemuel's facial scar was caused by a fellow soldier's teeth striking his face at high velocity as shrapnel, in an explosion that left the soldier in question a bloody smear and tore the flesh loose from another soldier's arm.
    • Several of Shaensigin‎'s human victims are seen, with their faces stretched into horrified screams and their bodies entirely encased in salt. Mallory comments that she enjoys killing them slow and making them scream, desiccating them while they're still alive.
    • When Murkoph tries to escape the khert Duane rips off the skin on his torso and head while grabbing him, and then tosses the whole mess back down into the khert. Murkoph then pulls the skin back on lopsided and doesn't put his arms back in right away, with the skin hanging like gory sleeves.
    • The imagery of Lady I's "passion" for Bastion has her silver hooks and fingers digging into his hands and then growing up through his arms like tendrils. Given the nature of his torque, which is silver connected to her that has roots worming their way into his neck and through his body it's not that far off reality.
    • The Silver Eel has crawled into and merged with Ana, who ripped her own breast off once she'd accepted the genocidal ghosts as part of herself.
    • The waterwomen hidden beneath the shrine are hung on large hooks jammed through them while they are screaming for their sisters and brothers. The artificers keep them cut to just their upper torso and heads with water dripping on them just enough that they cannot lose consciousness. Given their nature this means the artificers have to keep trimming away at them. When one of their sisters finally makes it to them they ask her to unmake them rather than try to free them.
    • Those who die inside the Silver Eel do not properly depart into the khert, and parts of their souls are left trapped within it. Starfish turns out to have left enough of his memories in the eel that a twisted tumorous fleshy snake with his decaying head forces its way free of it, to attack his surviving victims when he hears Matty's name being called.
    • While the bite marks themselves are unpleasant weeping wounds the visualization of Roger's mind being torn apart by efheby venom shows him unspooling apart around them, with even his bones breaking apart, as he tears and his own head and begs Maha to ensure Ruck dies after she's done with him. When Roger's final fate is shown his body is covered in open bites while cerebrospinal fluid leaks from his nose.
    • Most plods are rather uniform and covered up, but the ones created from the corpse piles in Grenzlan are in various states of decomposition and undress and all with their eyes pecked out as they crawl and attack the soldiers, who are then turned into more plods. Several of them are on fire as well.
    • When Sette starts tearing apart ghosts her hands start bleeding, and the next time she does so it's shown that the reason for the blood is because she has spikes of bone poking out of her hands while she's attacking them. Also her ability to edit her memories turns out to be far more literal than just focusing on what she wants to focus on and is not limited to her own memories.
    • By the time the defensive barrier comes down Ana is looking much worse for wear. Even though she's still conscious and a willing part of the Silver Eel her face is down to a bleeding skull. Presumably she cannot separate from the silver and remain alive anymore.
    • Ruck tortures Karl to death while pontificating about being better than humans, stabbing and pulling at him and slicing off parts of his face with the memory erasing hooked knife all while swinging him about like a helpless doll by his handcuffed arms and raping his body even after he seems to have succumbed.
    • Ana ends up betrayed by Cutter and her body is torn open and apart by ghosts till the only recognizably human part of her left is her beating heart, tightly wrapped in silver thorns as she's still not permitted to die and her soul screams in agony.
  • After this strip of VG Cats, you will never look at Bubble Bobble the same way ever again.
  • In We Are The Wyrecats, the serum meant to save K.A.'s life is also significantly disfiguring her appearance, including her facial features, to her horror.
  • In Welcome to the pharmacy!, one client has his head mutate into a bug-like monstrosity. His only concern is the resulting headache.
  • White Rooms: The spider monsters that roam in the white rooms have a giant human-like mouth on their backs that they use to kill their prey, and they can use their tongue to grab their targets.
  • Whomp!: This comic (25/4/2012) deals with what happens when your flesh falls off. Urgh.
  • In the comic Wurr, the hellhounds have been exposed to mutating Black Touch for generations, resulting in strange mutations such as extra limbs, eyes, too many teeth, strange skeletal structures, and countless other strange features. Some hellhounds, called Whispering Ones don't even have proper genetalia.
  • Zarla's Undertale comic about an alternate universe where Sans and Papyrus become an amalgamate is quite horrifying. The way Sans' and Papyrus' body's melt together is just as horrifying and saddening as the canon amalgamates.


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