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Eldritch Abomination / Comic Books

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https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Ogdru_Jahad_5596.gif
Ogdru Jahad, The Seven Who Are One.
Eldritch Abomination in Comic Books.
  • 2000 AD:
    • Necronauts: The Sleepers in the Void are shapeless beings from between dimensions who devour human souls. Houdini has angered them many times by traveling to the border between life and death and escaping their grasp every single time, while Lovecraft is inspired to write his stories after his encounter with them.
    • Aquila: Ammit the Devourer. From what little we've seen of her, she's a bloated monstrosity that's all tentacles and mouths and feasts on the souls of the damned.
  • In the end, the Hunters Three of the New 52 Animal Man are subversions. Three absolutely horrific creatures who "disguise themselves as men". According to interviews, the three of them are from the edges of the DC Universe and serve a dark force lurking beneath it. Though, really, their appearance says it all. But the Hunters Three turn out to be ordinary people after Maxine frees them of their corruption. The Rot itself is actually the natural force of death and decay corrupted by Anton Arcane, an all too human villain.
  • Astro City is full of these.
    • The Hanged Man is seen fighting one at the end of the "Confession" arc, which is revealed to have been the true source of the serial killings in the area that had caused a serious case of social unrest. Later stories suggest that the abomination behind the killings was actually the Oubor (see below)..
    • Eldritch Abominations are just a part of the neighborhood for the Shadow Hill district. The residents' daily routines includes refreshing the wards protecting their homes while ignoring the tentacled horrors retreating from daylight. The people who live there get by because they've gotten used to the vampires, the things that terrify the vampires, the Hanged Man hanging about, and all of the other unsettling weirdness that comes with the place.
    • The Hanged Man himself may be an unsettling figure, but he is a hero, albeit a Terror Hero with power akin to characters like The Spectre.
    • "Where the Action Is" deals with a comic book publisher deciding — after a bad run in with several superbeings angry about what his comics have been saying about them — that maybe it's time to switch to cosmic based stories, because nobody of that nature would care about some little comic book, right? This assertion is proven very, very, wrong...
    • The story "Thumbtacks & Yarn" introduces the Blasphemy Boys, a government agency out to contain such horrors, such as the Batrachi. It goes badly for them.
      • Later on in the same issue we see a glimpse of what looks like one that's been imprisoned. It's a fragment of the Oubor, locked up but still capable of influencing the world outside.
    • Whatever the "Oubor" is that the Broken Man is so afraid of sounds like one. It's eventually confirmed that it is. It turns out to be a primordial darkness which has been around since the early days of man, and takes their existence personally. It's been manipulating and infecting heroes, erasing any and all knowledge of itself, and has been battling the living incarnations of counterculture music.
    • The Unbodied, myths who were once worshipped, and would like very much to be so again, trying to get back into the world by any means they can. One of them, He Who Lies Buried, is tied to the origin of American Chibi.
    • It's said that the Void Between the Worlds is a black and featureless place, filled with hungry, nasty, vengeful things trying to break through. It's also believed that the Pale Horseman is one of those horrors given human form.
  • Atomic Robo had to fight an extradimensional Eldritch Abomination once - or four times, more accurately. Not because it kept coming back, but because it existed simultaneously across several points in space-time. It proves able to "intersect" with our universe by horrifyingly merging facets of itself with people or animals, turning them into freakish monsters under its control, but which thankfully return to normal when the thing gets defeated.
    Victim: Help me...
    Robo: She's still in there! She's still alive!
    Ira: Holy God...
    Mac: God's got nothing to do with this.
  • The Authority once faced "the closest thing to God this Solar System has ever seen". It was so big that Carrier, a city-sized spaceship, could travel its circulatory system like a bacteria travels ours and old enough that his parasites evolved into a civilization. This monster was responsible for Earth's creation and lived on it for some time. When he came back, he wasn't pleased to find out that his planet had new tenants.
    • The Lost Year miniseries also dealt with the Authority ending up in a universe without superpowered beings and trying to figure out why their powers were wonky. As the Doctor put it, they'd ended up in a universe where Lovecraft was right — the earth was in thrall to a cosmic parasite that lurked in the back of everyone's minds. And the Authority's presence just woke it up.
      • The feeding of said parasite caused a lot of problems for its victims, with many people suffering headaches, nausea, irritation, exhaustion, and general misery, with occasional people committing horrible acts or even suicide because of the thing's presence. Did we mention this world was exactly like ours? Commence paranoia now...
  • The Batman mythos, while being pretty grounded in reality (Safe for some more fantastical villains like Ra's al Ghul) still has shown us a couple beings who are truly weird.
  • The Lord of Locusts from Bone, an ancient nightmare spirit without shape or form that cannot exist in the mortal world without inhabiting a mortal host. He obsessively desires to escape the Dreaming and experience real life, not caring that his mere presence in the waking world causes a Reality-Breaking Paradox that creates Ghost Circles, pockets of pure void that trap the spirits of living beings in eternal agony. Nobody knows why he does anything he does; his personality and motivations are simply beyond human understanding, and he isn't treated like a character so much as a thing that just exists without explanation.
  • Deep Sea: In the original short comic, it's revealed that Crudelis, or Sludge as it's more commonly known, is harvested from a giant blob creature at the bottom of the ocean. It has one eye larger than the other, limbs that either have a three-fingered hand or a curved spike on their end, its nostrils are located above its eyes, and its mouth is a proboscis with several eyes on tendrils sticking out of it.
  • One Donald Duck issue, "The Call of C'Russo", revealed that a giant octopus called Ar-Finn sleeps beneath the depths in a sunken city (Cthulhu and R'lyeh, anyone?). Our reality (or at least Donald's) exists only because Ar-Finn dreams about it. If he wakes up, the world will start to adapt to his image, with the architecture becoming more and more alien and the people more octopoid in appearance. It was awfully cynical for a Disney story, especially the ending, where Donald is horrified to find out that our whole existence is just a dream. Probably as close to Lovecraftian standards as Disney will come for the foreseeable future.
  • The DCU 52 miniseries introduced the Four Horsemen of Apokolips: ancient, primal entities that hail from Apokolips and predate the New Gods. They are limited only by their inability to physically manifest in the universe without assistance. In their debut, using flawed bodies that could only channel a fraction of their true power, they devastated Kahndaq, murdered Black Adam's new family, and nearly killed Black Adam himself. Thankfully, they are now Sealed Evil in a Can... inside Veronica Cale.
    • Furthermore, 52 featured the evolution of the villain Mr. Mind, who became a cosmically huge insect abomination. He's responsible for the differences between the 52 realities of the DC multiverse, having eaten key moments in time from all but one of them.
  • Caged Demonwolf from Empowered is an extradimensional Energy Being so powerful that, before his sealing, not even the A-list supers could stand up to him. He is a Non-Linear Character who confirms that he can see every point of his own life (which will continue beyond this universe and into the next one) already, and also hints that he is aware of the fact that they are all fictional characters.
    • A short story in the Empowered Unchained volume has a vast Living Ship (and its baby) who are shown to have entire worlds inside them and are able to suffer from infection by parasites that are intelligent and human-sized.
  • Grant Morrison especially enjoys these.
    • They used another member of Starro's species simply called "the Star Conqueror" during their run of JLA. It had a different color scheme and was much bigger — like Hudson Bay bigger. In its second and so far final appearance, it invaded the dreams of the American populace, putting to sleep and taking control of nearly everyone in the entire country. It took a two front assault on the creature — some of the remaining JLA members attacked its physical self while the Lord of the Dreaming aided the other JLA members in attacking its mental self — to stop it. It was finally driven off into deep space while its mental self was imprisoned in the Dream Lord's chest.
    • Mageddon, the Big Bad of their JLA run, is a cosmic doomsday weapon that survived the death of the universe of the god-like beings who built it. Its purpose is to initiate universal suicide by psychically prompting all living beings to war with each other to death. Even when disabled (by the combined forces of the angelic hosts of Heaven, every single human being on Earth endowed with super powers, and a secret weapon that was its Kryptonite), it was still in danger of detonating and vaporizing half the galaxy. All while being far larger than the Earth.
    • Hexus, the Living Corporation, from Marvel Boy, is a being native to another universe who is the Abstract Apotheosis of Capitalism Is Bad, a sentient idea/psychic parasite that takes the shape of Brand Hex, a MegaCorp that brainwashes new employees to be its avatars, who then work like slaves to enlarge Brand Hex' reach. By the time Noh-Varr fought it, it had already marked our planet for other celestial predators with a giant Brand Hex logo. Since as an idea it was unkillable, untouchable and invisible, it could easily hop from avatar to avatar and evade Noh's attacks, but was defeated when Plex uploaded its corporate secrets and tricks to the Internet, and left Hexus without a way to keep expanding, before being shot down with a cosmic bullet.
    • The Invisibles is particularly full of them, mainly because its Genre Mashup includes Cosmic Horror:
      • The Archons of the Outer Church are typical Eldritch Abominations — slimy, chitinous, and decidedly non-human. Unless you've had cyborg implants installed on your body, being near them will probably cause you cancer. In an interesting inversion of Lovecraft's themes, the Archons aren't entities of entropic chaos, but absolute order. When the universe reorients itself in their presence, it's not because it's breaking down, but because it's coming more in line with the Archons' specifications.
      • Also from the same comic is Barbelith. An ancient sentient satellite that trains our generation's messiah and serves as a bridge between Earth and the Invisible College. In the last issue it is revealed that Barbelith was our reality's placenta, and in the 22/12/2012, Barbelith pops like a bubble and makes the three-dimensional world real. Or something.
      • In the Dulce base there exists a "mass of living information" of six dimensions, identified as this universe's equivalent of the Roswell Incident. It is described as God and Azazoth and looks like a shapeshifting blob of mercury. It was brought to our reality after the detonation of atomic bombs in Los Alamos by Oppenheimer (Who was a priest of Azazoth) punched a hole in reality.note 
      • Quimper used to be a mischievous metaphysical imp that fell on Earth while paddling at the edges of dreams, and became a deformed goblin monster that works as a Mind Virus that infects traumas and makes them overtake the memory's owners.
      • All the gods in the comic book are portrayed in a more eldritch light. The Aztec pantheon is made of skeleton Gods who operate under Blue-and-Orange Morality and rules over bizarre surreal hellish landscapes, while the Voodoo Loas look like chimeras of spiders, reptiles, scorpions, leeches and bats.
    • Zenith in 2000 AD features a number of five-dimensional beings, the Lloigor, who owe more than just their names to H. P. Lovecraft (and turn out to be former superheroes Gone Horribly Wrong).
    • Their run on Doom Patrol was practically made of these. Orqwith, a city that doesn't exist and sends out Scissormen to cut people out of reality as we know it. Red Jack, who lives in a pocket dimension mansion with a floating head that is just a mask and claims to be both God and Jack the Ripper. The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, Extinction and Oblivion, who lives inside a painting that can 'eat' reality and is gigantic with no skin. The Decreator, some kind of anti-god that appears as simply a gigantic eye in the sky. The Avatar that lives under the Pentagon appears to be this, although we didn't get to see too much of its full extent, but required Flex Mentallo, who can warp reality by flexing his muscles, to force the Pentagon into a circle, which caused an immense amount of strain, and the summoning of The Candlemaker, a far worse Eldritch Abomination, to stop it.
    • The Big Bad of Morrison's run on Action Comics is Vyndktvx, a 5th Dimension Imp, like Mr. Mxyzptlk, only a psychotic mass murderer rather than a practical joker.
    • The Gentry from The Multiversity are a group of evil entities that are roaming the multiverse and destroying every world they come across in really horrific ways. Just seeing them from another universe crippled Lord Havok and drove him mad. They're also powerful enough to trap Nix Uotan, the last Monitor, in the panels of the comic book he's appearing in and convert him into one of their own. On top of all that, it's implied that reading the series will let the Gentry into our universe.

      In the end, it's even worse. It turns out that the Gentry are from our universe, Earth-33. And they are all just servants to an even bigger threat, the Empty Hand, who has all of Earth-42 inhabitants (the Li'l League included) as his servants and spies. And even when the Gentry were beaten, Empty Hand just created new ones like it was nothing and the combined efforts of the entire Multiversity would most likely not be effective as Empty Hand is the personification of our growing real world apathy towards superheroes and comics. And Empty Hand is still digesting and gaining strength from the previous pre-Flashpoint multiverse. The best the Multiversity can do is establish a watch until they can come up with a way to take down Empty Hand and his Gentry... and the rest of Earth-33 if it comes to it...
  • The Green Lantern comics has seen various alien entities that are incarnations of the various colors of the emotional spectrum, which has led to some fan speculating that these beasts may be like infant Chaos Gods from Warhammer 40,000 in training. These include the Yellow Entity Parallax (Fear), the Green Entity Ion (Will), and the Violet Predator (Love). These entities are known to possess and empower worthy individuals, but are often monstrous and insanely powerful.
    • The Orange Entity Ophidian (Avarice) was confirmed by Word of God to be the voice within the Orange Lantern Battery that converts its wielder into Agent Orange. Atrocitus initially assumed The Spectre, the agent of God's Wrath, was the Rage entity. The Spectre denied this, claiming that he has met the Rage entity and warning Atrocitus (who, as one of the Five Inversions, is himself a Humanoid Abomination even without his red power ring) that seeking it out would only lead to his destruction. Adara, the Blue Entity of Hope, looks like a huge eagle... with three faces and beaks; while Proselyte, the Indigo Entity of Compassion, is just a massive octopus. Presumably, he just wants to hug you.
    • Nekron, the Guardian of the Black Lantern Corps, whose plan is revealed to be killing the Entity, the being of White Light that gave birth to all life, and, as a result, kill everything in a instant. The moment he dealt the first blow, we know he meant business. And he was created by the darkness preceding the universe. Nekron is such an Eldritch Abomination that he can't even exist as a physical entity. He needs a tether for that, which comes in the form of the necrophilic herald of death, William Hand. This only works when he's dead, however.
  • Hack/Slash:
    • The Neflords, giant masses of tentacles (that double as wing wongs that can make things explode) which possibly lived in the void that existed before God created the universe. Being unable to create life themselves, the Neflords need virgins taken from Earth to impregnate to create minions. Also, their main servant was Elvis. Yes, really.
    • Later villain Mary Shelley Lovecraft, a metafictional entity who seeks to tear down the walls between "ideaspace" and reality. Intentionally or not, her mere presence in a reality causes stories to blur together (while in the Lovebunny Universe, the events of Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space" occurred, and while in the Archie Comics-inspired town of Haverhill, "The Shadow Over Haverhill" happened, with some Frankenstein thrown in for good measure). The only reason Cassie and Vlad managed to (temporarily) kill her was because she was severely weakened due to a confrontation with a shitload of superheroes (despite taking place in some kind of void, the power she exerted in that battle was able to reach the Hack/Slash Universe and cause every holiday-themed slasher to come out of hibernation early).
  • Hellblazer
    • John Constantine met and defeated two Lovecraftian gods from different story arcs. Jallakuntilliokan, a two headed dragon/floating meat who eats reality, and M'Nagalah, who is the god of cancer.
  • Hellboy.
    • The Ogdru Jahad, neither male nor female, sleeping until they bring the downfall of man. They have an army of frog men that have long, clinging tongues capable of sapping the prodigious strength of Hellboy, let alone a human, can take on the appearance of a normal human being, possess Genetic Memory, and have the knowledge of great spells of power not heard on the Earth for millions of years. Also, every single frog man is a human infected by the Ogdru Jahad.
  • The Moose from Johnny the Homicidal Maniac looks like this trope, and its initial appearance screams this as it tears through Johnny's Torture Cellar, killing everyone, and apparently destroys reality upon reaching the surface. Despite this, however, it's later revealed by the Devil that its origins are closer to that of The Heartless: it's an accumulated distillation of negative psychic residues created by humans behaving generally badly.
  • The Justice League of America sometimes faces these.
    • Starro, the very first foe they dealt with, slowly moved in this direction over the years, being a literal Starfish Alien that latches onto you and takes away your free will, though there was recently revealed to be a humanoid alien controlling the giant starfish "Starro" that the Justice League faced in the past. The humanoid alien has a smaller starfish on his chest. He controls the Starri from that.
    • The Silver Age homage DC: The New Frontier had "The Centre", an ancient and unstoppable monstrosity. It also happens to be a giant island. Of Dinosaurs.
    • The ultimate would be the Anti-Monitor, the Big Bad of Crisis on Infinite Earths. An Energy Being composed of pure anti-matter on the inside, covered by a giant armored shell that serves as an energy collector to gather positive matter from the universes he wiped out. At his strongest point (when he traveled to the beginning of time), a coalition of heroes from many universes and time periods didn't even scratch his armor. He was eventually killed by being magically poisoned, being attacked with the power of a star, attacked by two parallel universe Kryptonians, hit by Darkseid's full power, and finally thrown into a star, but that didn't stick. It took a duel with all the Guardians of the Universe and a galaxy-wiping explosion to take him out a second time. And now, thanks to Blackest Night, he's baaaaack...
    • Mandrakk, on the other hand, is a gigantic vampiric Monitor that feeds on reality itself. To quote Zillo Valla: "Carriers, Destroyers, Tankers, and Explorers... vast in scale from your perspective, these machines are mere Monitor nanotechnology! The eyes of Mandrakk." Or, to quote Mandrakk himself: "Let me feed and feed until nothing remains but Mandrakk! Bloated and alone beneath a skyful of murdered stars!" To stop him, the Question and Captain Marvel (of Earth-5) have to bring forth the Supermen of the Multiverse, an army of alternate universe Supermen, and Nix Uotan has to summon Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew!, the Angels of the Pax Dei, the Forever People of the 5th World, and finally, the Green Lantern Corps has to stake it with a giant energy stake. This all takes up about the space of 3 or 4 pages, but it is an awesome sight to behold.
    • Another Abomination is the baffling entity known as the Overmonitor or Overvoid. It's a sentient void, inside which the entire DC Multiverse exists. It created the Monitors, and it's heavily implied that both the Monitor and Anti-Monitor were born from a probe it sent to investigate: meaning it's responsible for two eldritch abominations already. And, even weirder, it's described as being the embodiment of the very concept of the narrative.
    • Imperiex is the power of the Big Bang given form, who sought to reboot the universe due to an impurity in the fabric of existence that it detected. Ironically enough, that flaw was Imperiex itself. It proved to be enough of a threat to force Mongul II and fucking Darkseid to ally with Superman and the rest of the resistance force. One of his most immense displays of power was reducing Doomsday to a skeleton in one shot. He was finally destroyed by a sun-drenched Superman after an enormous battle, though not before killing off a good portion of both the resistance force and Earth.
    • Finally, there's the King of Tears, an extradimensional god who, after Johnny Sorrow is sucked into said dimension by a malfunctioning subspace gun, pieces him back together and contorts his face to the point where it is so hideous that anything that sees it (barring special circumstances) dies of shock, and makes him his servant, with his primary goal being to pull the strings required to allow the King to break into our world. The King himself manifests as a hideous crimson blob covered in tentacles and eyes. While Johnny has managed to get the King out on several occasions, he never stays long, primarily because something as inimical to reality as the King tends to attract the JSA.
      • Johnny Sorrow himself is one. His normal appearance is invisible, nothing seen around the mask or sleeves of his mostly-full-body-concealing costume. When he takes off his mask, his true face will indeed kill, and those who do survive do not survive unscathed and are pretty powerful characters in their own right. (So, if you're an insanely powerful magic user such as the wizard Shazam, you might get off as easily as being turned to stone.) His unmasked face is typically depicted as a blinding light that doesn't let the reader see; the one time it is fully seen, however, it's a disgusting mass of tentacles and insectoid limbs. He also controls demons and can open portals to his master's home dimension, and has survived without aging since the silent film era.
  • The Last God from DC Black Label has the titular Last God, Mol Uhltep. Unlike the other gods of Cain Anuun, Mol Uhltep was not made by The Creator Ang Luthia. Instead, out of curiosity, the young gods ventured into the Void, a place forbidden them by Ang Luthia. There they found an unliving lump of vaguely humanoid shape. Pitying the thing, the goddess Mol Annwe shaped it a bit further and gave it some of her life force to animate it. The newborn god was named Mol Uhltep and as a thing of the Void, it hated life and wishes to return the living part of the Cosmos into an inert mass like it was in the beginning of time. The key to it doing so are its children, the Flowering Dead which are an undead mix of plant and animal as well as its Conquering Infection which is a disease that can afflict anything even potentially stone. Mol Uhltep was even able to contaminate the flesh of the God of the Forge after he nearly tore the god to shreds.
  • In Locke & Key, this is what's behind the Black Door, a dimension of multi-eyed, mobile black tentacles. Fortunately, they can't cross beyond the threshold of the door without dying and petrifying into Whispering Iron (the apparently self-aware material the series' magical keys are made of)... unless, of course, they manage to possess a person by latching onto their soul, which corrupts them, leaving them sociopathically violent and with an urge to free more of them. This, as it turns out, is what happened to Dodge, making these beings the collective Greater-Scope Villain of the series.
  • Though, in appearance, they are standard angels and demons, many of the characters of Lucifer have powers and attitudes that are more in line with this trope. At one point, Lucifer flies out to just in front of the Source mentioned above and ignores it. It's simply beneath his notice at the time.
  • Marvel Universe:
    • Doctor Strange tends to fight these: Dormammu, the ruler of the Dark Dimension, and is the most-powerful of the Faltine — a species of mystical entites manifested from magic; Nebulos, who can channel infinite energy and required the Living Tribunal to stop it, Satannish, a Reality Warper Hell-Lord of two faces and four horns; Nightmare, an Energy Being Made of Evil of the psychic plane that feeds on fear; Blackheart, Mephisto's son made from the pain of murder victims...
      • Special mention goes to Zom, an ancient living weapon with unspeakable power sealed in a magical amphora, that Strange has to let out to have any hope of defeating Umar. It works, scaring Umar (a Humanoid Abomination with near-godlike magical power nearly on par with those of her brother, the aforementionned Dormammu) shitless, and it takes the Goddamn Living Tribunal itself to put him back. Later on, during World War Hulk, Strange imbues himself with some of Zom's power and proceeds to beat the shit out of the Hulk before getting distracted.
    • The Old Ones/Many-Angled Ones — namely Shuma-Gorath — are directly based on the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods of the Cthulhu Mythos; and are ancient multiversal threats. The most powerful known regular demon lords are supposed to be as insects to them, as they are stated to be only a step or two below the Living Tribunal. Carnage Vol. 2 counts the Elder God Chthon as the mightiest of them, portraying him as an expy of Cthulhu who was sealed away in the extradimensional realm of K'lay, and with the chant to summon him paraphrasing the iconic chant from The Call of Cthulhu.
    • Galactus. Older than the universe itself and incomprehensible by mortals. It's Canon that his hat-wearing humanoid form is simply an image our puny minds superimposes over a reality we cannot truly comprehend; for instance, Beta-Ray Bill's species sees him as a big starfish.
    • Although he's a mechanical example, Ultimate Gah Lak Tus definitely qualifies. Aside from driving everyone who sees it insane and spreading a flesh eating virus across the planets it consumes, much of the devastation it causes stems from its own gravitational pull.
    • Mephisto qualifies as this. Sure that he may look like a a red-skinned vampire, but that's just his most common form. In reality, Mephisto is an inconceivable embodiment of evil that rules a part of Hell's plane of existence, and he has gave a taste of what he truly looks here◊! It's implied that he might not have any form at all. Downplayed in that while he likes to act like he's a big deal, he's a lightweight compared to Set, Chthon, Dormammu, and the other really nasty beings out there.
    • The Other. True to its name, The Other is an Eldritch Abomination that is so other that it cannot be perceived by even the most powerful abstracts in existence; it is also incapable of manifesting its true form, provided that it actually has one, in our reality. It must instead use projections of one or more physical entities such as The Greys or a colossal human hand with two large starry eyes on its palm that may or may not actually exist in order to interact with our reality.
    • In the Realm Of Kings one-shot, Quasar visited the Cancerverse — an Alternate Universe which was apparently sold to the Many-Angled Ones. Not only does everybody in this world carry an Eldritch Abomination inside their body, but the whole UNIVERSE is also one fricking Eldritch Abomination. It turns out that the whole thing started when somebody who turned out to be Captain Marvel killed Death in this universe, which caused life to grow unfettered... and turn cancerous.
      Quasar: I see it now! I see it all! Their universe! Disgusting! An abomination! Pulsating with corrupt life! One giant, twisted organic mass! Their whole universe is a deathless corpse! A cancer trying to metastasize into our reality! I asked: what’s the worst that could happen? This is. How can I protect the universe from another universe? Galaxies and worlds all united to consume us?
    • The Thanos Imperative event is about said universe finally flooding into the 616 proper. Just to give you an idea of how terrible this is, not only has Galactus joined the resistance, not only have the freakin' Celestials joined the fight, but the Guardians of the Galaxy are forced to recruit THANOS to have any hope of winning in a universe without death. It's especially unnerving since this essentially makes Life itself an Eldritch Abomination. When one thinks about it, it's an invasive species writ large (without death, there was no checks on the growth of life; without checks, life began to absorb everything into itself...).
    • From The Incredible Hercules event Chaos War - Amatsu-Mikaboshi, CHAOS KING. Like Galactus, he comes from a Universe that was before the current Marvel Universe — or rather, he was that universe. He's Anti-Eternity, Evil Twin of Eternity, Anthropomorphic Personification of the Universe itself, an ultimate force of destruction that will not rest until the Universe is destroyed and nothing aside from him remains. And he can squish All-Father level gods like they were flies.
    • There are also The Infinites, a trio of immense beings who traveled the multiverse realigning the energies of universes in a way they considered harmonious. They were so big that one of their hands was larger than a galaxy. It took The Avengers summoning Eternity, the living embodiment of the Marvel Universe, to face them. When they learned that their actions were causing the deaths of countless beings, they were horrified and abandoned their experiment and began to make amends throughout the universes they visited.
    • Thanos and Galactus also once ran into a being called the Hunger, which operated on a universal scale. It was to Galactus what Galactus was to human beings. It was depicted as a gigantic black void with glowing eyes of fire, because nothing else could portray a pit where existence ceases. Thanos managed to prevent his arrival in this universe, and cut off a piece of the being, which withered and died. But its main body is still out there.
    • The Phoenix Force is a cosmic entity that embodies both creation and destruction, manifested as a bird of prey made from cosmic flames. It is powerful enough to destroy the universe itself, and seeks out hosts with psychic powers. While not strictly benevolent or malevolent, its Dark Phoenix aspect — as shown in Avengers vs. X-Men — has a penchant for eating stars and planets to maintain its energy. This was particularly displayed when Thor managed to hurt it in deep space, smashing it halfway across a solar system. This turned out to be a case of Nice Job Breaking It, Hero, as the Phoenix promptly ate the nearest planet. The Worf Effect ensued. When Jean Grey — or rather, the Phoenix Force impersonating her — became the Dark Phoenix in The Dark Phoenix Saga, it caused a planetary-level genocide and nearly inspired an interstellar war.
    • Robert Reynolds, aka The Sentry, is implied to only be as human as he believes himself to be. When he reappears after being atomized by Morgan le Fay, the Dark Avengers - a group including the likes of Bullseye and Venom - are freaked out. And then there's the fact that his Superpowered Evil Side, the Void◊, has been around since Biblical times as the Angel of Death and is powerful enough to destroy planets, if not galaxies.
    • And from Young Avengers vol.2 we have the Big Bad, Mother - a parasite from another dimension, who feeds on powers of reality-warping children (only this kind of power can hurt it, but kids aren't experienced enough to consist a challenge for it). It's abilities allow some really freaky transformation, as well as power to warp reality around it, taking control of adults, obscuring themselves from the eyes of those who are strong enough to resist mind control, and transforming things in bizarrely creative ways with a bit of meta touch (it once trapped Billy into an empty panel frame). It's home dimension is an Eldritch Location on itself. It's currently using the form of Teddy's dead mother. Oh, and at one point it eats the narrator, while he begs readers to save him.
    • Patriot Costume may be this - nobody knows where it came from, why it took the form it did, why it kidnapped Speed and what it wants from the Young Avengers. However, it can freely walk in and out of Mother's home dimension and not get attacked. It seems to even creep out Mother a bit.
    • Venom Vol. 4 reveals that the symbiotes are formed from a fount of eldritch darkness called the living abyss, created by the dark god Knull — whose own existence predates the universe — in order to devour the gods and their creations.
    • It's safe to say that the Marvel Universe is basically a Cosmic Horror Universe. Heck, at one point Marvel published Conan the Barbarian comics which were considered to the be part of the Marvel Universe... and the Conan franchise is generally thought to be part of the Cthulhu Mythos.
    • Immortal Hulk introduces the "One Below All", the entity that resides in the deepest layer of hell, who serves as the direct Evil Counterpart to the One Above All, aka God in the Marvel Universe. That prospect alone makes the likes of Shuma-Gorath and Dormammu look like Adorable Abominations by comparison, but what's even more frightening is that when it possessed the Hulk, Doctor Strange asked Mephisto (a literal Satanic Archetype) to remove it from him and Mephisto remarked that he couldn't as this being was beyond even him, the ruler of hell. The One Below All is also connected to Gamma Energy and manipulates and controls many of the Gamma Beasts Hulk and co face. Fortunately, while it can influence the multiverse beyond its domain, it cannot directly affect it - it needs a host, who becomes both themselves and the One Below All. Not that this is much comfort; a flash-forward has shown that if the One Below All possesses the Hulk, the combined being will outlive the current incarnation of the Marvel universe (Galactus-style) and exterminate all life in the next one.
  • Monstress: The Old Gods are a race of giant, many-eyed, dark-skinned monstrous beings who are exiled from another dimension. They all drain life-force at a touch and have great supernatural power even in death. The one god that died, an island spontaneously formed from his/her bones as did undead guardians to defend it.
  • The New Gods's Darkseid is the Abstract Apotheosis of evil with access to such uncanny powers as the And I Must Scream-inducing Omega Effect or the Anti-Life Equation, and who rules over a borderline-Eldritch Location found outside of time and space. Canonically every Darkseid in the multiverse (And New God for that matter) is just a fraction of the true entity, which are implied to live infinite dimensions about us and to be the essence of what they represent. This means that Darkseid isn't just the God of Evil inside the comic, he is a fraction of our reality's platonic ideal of Evil!
    • Darkseid's eldritch status is played for all it's worth during Final Crisis; after his reincarnation into Dan Turpin, his presence actually starts to decay time and space. Mandrakk is using Darkseid's attack to hide his own plans (but is stopped before getting too far). How does Darkseid break reality (one parallel universe actually is destroyed by this)? He sits on his throne, waiting for reality to die MERELY BECAUSE HE EXISTS.
      • Relating to Darkseid, the Omega Effect is an Eldritch Abomination in itself: It's an extradimensional force that can not only desintegrate almost anything (if you're as tough as Cyborg Superman maybe you will just barely die) and allow Darkseid to then recreate you as a zombie, but also has the Life Trap, which is manifested as a void with a vaguely human shape called the Omega Sanction that traps you infinitely in increasingly more dreadful lifes until you become a servant of Anti-Life. Shilo Norman, the greatest escape artist ever trained by the Abstract Apotheosis of freedom is so far the only thing to have escaped the Omega Sanction's full power.
      • Finally, the Anti-Life Equation is also an Eldritch Abomination: a sentient abstract mathematical formula that shows the futility of life and can destroy free will. Some parts of it tend to crop up on Earth, particularly in its collective unconscious through characters like Sonny Sumo or Empress, the reason behind Darkseid's continuous attacks on Earth, despite multiple instances showing that not even Darkseid can either fully control or even comprehend Anti-Life, since it's tied directly to the Source, one of the few things Darkseid is powerless against. Pied Piper channeling the whole equation through The Power of Rock was enough to kill Desaad and destroy APOKOLIPS. Cosmic Odyssey shows the Anti-Life Equation as a shadowy Brown Note Being so powerful and evil that it forces Darkseid to work with his sworn enemies to stop it (although it was later retconned to be a different creature). The Death of the New Gods also features a similar concept, where Anti-Life is revealed to be one half of a cosmic being that was split into two by the war of the Old Gods, but this was also retconned later, although not 100% dropped.
  • Nth Man: The Ultimate Ninja : M'Gubgub is a galaxy-devouring abomination with a million forms that has to spread his mass out over hundreds of light-years just to prevent his gravitational field from collapsing on itself. It wants to destroy the Earth in order to eliminate a temporal anomaly there.
    "This is but the merest pseudopod of my being! A single follicle protruding from a minor pore! I exist simultaneously in countless forms, stretching out beyond your planetary system into the cold barren emptiness between the stars."
  • The Veratu in the miniseries Rainbow in the Dark. They are a swarm of ghostly looking entities with human flesh masks over their faces. Their one and only goal is to keep humanity locked in a colorless, monotonous Lotus-Eater Machine for all time.
  • Robin (1993): Tim stumbles across a thing in the Appalachian Mountains that is currently in the form of an apparently harmless, if odd, little girl who maintains human form by linking itself to a human, who is given regenerative powers and made mute and whose mind is radically altered by the link. If the link is broken "she" reverts into a mass of tentacles, eyes and mouths and starts killing and eating everyone around "her" until she forms a new link. "She" doesn't seem to notice being shot and while using a flamethrower on her seems to get her attention it doesn't appear to actually cause her any damage.
  • The Sandman has the seven Endless, Anthropomorphic Personifications of platonic concepts that shapeshift into A Form You Are Comfortable With and are considered to be the second strongest beings in the DCU, only surpassed by Lucifer. They're wave functions esential for reality functioning, and when Lucifer created his own universe they cropped there, since it's impossible for a world to exist without them. Dream is a Reality Warper that rules the Dreaming, Delirium (Formerly Delight) is able to induce neverending madness at will, Despair lives in a mirrorhouse and stares at misery through the multiverse to Self-Harm to... Ironically enough, Death is by far the most nice and polite of all of them.
  • In Seconds, abusing the mushrooms seems to empower a demonic being who warps time. It's revealed, however, that it's actually another house spirit, vengeful after being displaced from its home.
  • The Warren Ellis comic Supergod opens with three astronauts returning to Earth having... merged into a cosmic consciousness thanks to exposure to space spores. Their very presence triggers reverence in the scientists observing them, and they seem to operate several levels above humanity. This triggers a superhero arms race amongst the nations of Earth that eventually results in humanity making their own Great Old Ones, which goes about as well as you'd expect.
  • Superman:
    • The 5th Dimensional Imps, of which Mr. Mxyzptlk is the most famous, have become an example of this. They can more or less wear the laws of physics like a funny paper hat, and while they tend to appear as cartoonish characters, those aren't their true forms. Luckily, most of them aren't interested enough in meddling with our universe, and those that do (like Bat-Mite) are permitted only to cause mischief. Sometimes hiccups occur, like the time Mxyzptlk made the well-intentioned mistake of giving his reality-reshaping powers to the Joker.
    • It's eventually revealed that there are even higher dimensions than this, each with their own imps. The higher the dimension, the stronger the imp, all the way up to the one and only tenth-dimensional imp, Ultimator. He looks like this◊.
    • Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? is set in an alternate possible future where Superman is getting ready to retire - up until all his enemies return, and all-out war between them and his friends (with Lois, Lana, and Jimmy taking up the Phlebotinum behind some of their one-shot powers from Silver Age stories). It's a brutal affair where people die and From Bad to Worse reigns supreme. Then he puts together the clues of what's really going on. It turns out: Myxy orchestrated all of this. As a superdimensional imp older than time, he is now bored with being mischievous; every so many millennia he reinvents himself. He was benevolent once, more recently a harmless trickster, but now? He wants to "try being evil for a while; maybe after 2000 years or so of that, I'll get to be guilty". When he drops the Goth version of his usual little-guy-in-a-hat image - mocking the idea that a sorcerer from the fifth dimension would really look like that - he appears as a jagged-edged humanoid tear in space with malevolent eyes and maws, and Lois points out for the benefit of us readers that it hurts her eyes just to try and look at it, like all the angles are wrong. Now THAT begins to approach the idea of a being from the Fifth Dimension.
    • Doomsday is an ancient Genetic Abomination, Living Weapon, and Walking Wasteland that can come back from the dead and adapt to everything that killed it, becoming stronger after each death. It sees any life form as a threat, so its main directive is to end all life, which it certainly seems capable of. It is most famous for managing to kill Superman in the famous storyline The Death of Superman, being the first and by far most famous villain to do so. At its most powerful it even managed to curb-stomp DARKSEID.
    • In The Supergirl from Krypton (2004), Superman is teleported to the Edge of the Universe. Way out there, space becomes white, and after that, there is a MASSIVE, INFINITE WALL of Eldritch Abominations / Body Horrors marking the final boundary between our universe and the next one over. In Countdown to Final Crisis, though, this wall has symbols and statues of humanoid figures on it, like it's the outside wall of the Monitor's base. The Source Wall lies on the edge of the known universe, in the Promethean Galaxy. Beyond the wall lies what is known as The Source, a cosmic essence or being that is the "source" of all that exists. The wall is theoretically passable. However, all those who try have been inevitably trapped in it. Over time, it has been made up of the bodies of would-be conquerors and curiosity seekers from all across the universe.
    • Viroxx, which could only be described an space-virus that devoured energy, capable of converting sentient beings into drones that in turn would absorb others as nourishment for their master. The assimilating process was supposedly irreversible and turns the victim into an unfeeling, cold-blooded monster interested only in killing more people to absorb their energy (one heartbreaking moment was when a scientist witnessed his recently converted wife devouring their daughter, and he ends up being forced to kill her in self-defense); It had laid waste to many worlds, destroying billions of lives and reducing entire populations into a few thousand vagrants based on space fleets. Even Superman himself is unable to hold it back and in the end, with the combined effort of all the survivors they only managed to scary it away — not kill it, but chase it far away from our galaxy.
    • The Phantom Zone: In Pre-Crisis continuity, there was an entity made of billions of dead souls from the earliest days of the universe. Calling itself Aethyr, or the Oversoul, it enclosed itself into a dimension outside the physical universe that it merged with its own mind and that it has absolute mastery of. Travel too far within it, and you risk your soul being destroyed and becoming part of Aethyr. At its outermost edge, representing Aethyr's capacity for abstract thought, is a realm where anyone within it can only exist as an incorporeal wraith: the Phantom Zone. And as of Escape from the Phantom Zone, Aethyr is BACK.
    • Solaris, the Solar Computer is a sentient artificial sun whose mere gravity threatened entire solar systems and later unleashed a cancer plague on Earth. His most famous feat though was poisoning the sun, which required Superman to sacrifice himself to fix it over the course of thousands of years.
    • Red Daughter of Krypton: Worldkiller-1 is an omnicidal, shape-shifting, sentient alien black goo which steals -and often consumes- bodies and is bonded with an indestructible armor suit. And it's nearly as strong and invulnerable as a Kryptonian. And it isn't vulnerable to Kryptonite.
    • In Supergirl story arc Bizarrogirl, the "Godship" is a moon-sized world-eating creature called "Ash'ka'phageous".
    • Supergirl's Greatest Challenge: A planetary explosion caused by a doomsday device turns a mad scientist and a laboratory animal into humongous masses of positive and negative energy. The former mad scientist -called Positive Man by the Legion of Super-Heroes for lack of a better name-, now looking like a translucent, white-outlined, vaguely-humanoid thing, hates life and roams the cosmos obliterating inhabited worlds by merely passing through them.
  • Swamp Thing:
    • Swamp Thing himself, since is a massive monster made of mud and organic matter that serves as the elemental embodiment of the Green, an interdimensional mystical force that connects all plant life. As such, Swampy has total control of the vegetation on the universe, including being able to regenerate from nothing, creating new bodies or teleporting through entire galaxies merely by transfering his consciousness to vegetation light years away. Upon meeting him, Black Orchid straight up thought of him as God.
      • Hell, every Elemental Realm could be considered an Eldritch Abomination. They're billion year old mystic forces of almost endless power that expand through the multiverse and serve as the Anthropomorphic Personification of various elements, and often need an avatar as their servant to work properly. The Green is the representation of plant life, while the Red serves as one for animal life and is ruled by Mix-and-Match Critters Animalistic Abominations. The Grey represents fungal life, while the Divided represents bacteria, and both look even more like a Botanical Abomination than the Green. From here, they get a bit more abstract: The Clear, the White, the Melt and the Ember represent water, air, earth and fire respectively (Red Tornado used to be a servant of the White, and Firestorm of the Ember), while the Rithm is technology. Finally and most creepy of them all, the Rot/The Black represents death and decay, and have a tendency of creating hideous Undead Abominations that tend to overstep their rules and try to end all organic life.
    • Scott Snyder's run introduces the horrifying Sethe, a horrific diseased demonic skeleton beast that spreads pestilence. Not only is its very appearance Nausea Fuel, but it's implied that it was responsible for not just The Black Death, but every single pestilence to afflict humanity. It's implied that Sethe and abovementioned The Hunters Three serve the same dark forces.
    • The Original Darkness, the Big Bad of the "Murder of Crows" arc. For starters, this thing is the chaos that existed prior to the Presence beginning its creation. It's also brain-meltingly enormous; the telepath Mento actually starts foaming at the mouth trying to comprehend the scale of this thing. Just having your existence acknowledged by it can have fatal results for even powerful magic-users, as Zatara and Sargon found out the hard way. Oh, and it's absolutely unstoppable; Etrigan, Doctor Fate, and The Spectre all try and fail horribly to halt its assault on Heaven, with the Spectre memorably being curbstomped by the Darkness's thumb. It takes the Presence itself to intervene to stop this thing, and it couldn't destroy the Darkness, merely nullify it, as they are equals.
  • Regular Teen Titans villain Trigon is an immortal gigantic demon from another dimension that has existed since the beginning of the universe as cosmic energy until the dimension of Azarath gave it a shape. It's a Made of Evil entity with Reality Warper powers so massive that in its homeland of Azarath, it can even rival fellow abomination Mr. Mxyzptlk, and has enslaved and destroyes whole universes. It's so powerfu that it requires an avatar to manifest properly into our world (In this case, his daughter Raven, a borderline Humanoid Abomination herself).
  • The Aunties from Thirsty Mermaids are seen as "sisters" of Mother Ocean and are just as abstract and unknowable as the Ocean itself. When they take in Eez, their attempts at taking on a physical form come across as very eldritch indeed.
  • Transformers comics:
    • These were responsible for Ramjet's Lovecraftian Superpowers. A servant of Unicron, Ramjet ended up in the beings' world when his master imploded, and he was unmade and remade a few times by the creatures for fun, and when they got bored with him, they dumped him back on his homeworld. Then they started working on getting out themselves.
  • The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye has a few examples:
    • The Sparkeater, a monster the crew encounters in issue 3. It's a floating, multi-tentacled monstrosity that kills biomechanical lifeforms by making them vomit out their own brain, then rips out their spark and eats it whole (which is comparable to eating human's soul). Legends say that it's attracted to emotional torment and searches for the locations of horrible crimes or tragedies to feast. The most disturbing part is that it used to be a normal Cybertronian; while normal, it was shot with an experimental weapon that basically killed it and then reanimated and mutated its body into the creature it became. What's worse, Brainstorm created the Sparkeater gun after an encounter with the Sparkeater, then when the crew went back to the past said gun was used on the Cybertronian who they'd later encounter as the Sparkeater. Yeah, it was their fault that the Sparkeater exists in the first place.
    • During the season 1 finale, Skids uses a portal made by Tyrest from Metrotitan body parts. On the other side he finds an Eldritch Location inhabited by a giant, floating being that resembles a flying ball of energy. It attempts to speak with him, but it communicates through synesthetic noises and sensations that mortal beings cannot understand. It also somehow knew who Skids was and what ship he was a crewmember on, despite never seeing him before. Interestingly, it's suggested to be a benevolent Eldritch Abomination; the sensations it uses to speak are shown to the reader and seem to be attempts to advise Skids on how to find the Knights of Cybertron.
    • The Omega Guardians end up as one of them, having been mentioned as having ascended to a higher plane of existence. They're one of the players in the Gambit Pileup in the final arc, attempting to bring about an explosion in an unstable region of space that would allow them to return to the regular plane and "eat everything". Luckily, the item they're using to convey this message, the Magnificence, is crushed in seconds by Nickel when they blurt that out, and the main characters figure out a solution to the problem that doesn't involve blowing it up.
  • Watchmen: Doctor Manhattan, a gigantic blue Energy Being who exists outside of time as we know it, experiencing all points in his life simultaneously. He also has Complete Immortality and the ability to exist in multiple places at once. Silk Spectre I describes him as a sentient H-bomb. His existence has caused substantial changes in the Alternate History; among other things, he is single-handedly responsible for the US winning the Vietnam War in about a week. At the end, he leaves Earth to find another planet he can populate with life. It is revealed in Doomsday Clock that he ended up in the DC universe and is, among other things, responsible for the New 52 by simply editing DC's history out of pure, cynical curiosity. He ends re-editing it after being inspired by Superman (and realising how important he is to every iteration of the DC Universe as The Cape), creating the Rebirth era of the DC universe, and using the last of his power to create a Watchmen version of Superman.
    • Watchmen also features a human-made abomination in the form of the Psychic Squid, a deformed and slimy giant mollusk-like thing created using the brain of a psychic and deliberately designed to look as repulsive as possible. On the second of November, the squid is teleported on New York, killing three million in a psychic attack and giving nightmares to people from around the world. It's so horrifying that it ends the Cold War because the world governments believe it's the first of a series of attacks from interdimensional aliens.
  • Wonder Woman
    • Wonder Woman (1942): The beings from Pluto do not reflect light so look like shadow and eat emotions, by splitting their victims into the colored emotional spectrum which destroys their body on the physical plane and lets the plutoians take their time eating since their victims cannot die, but are not fully alive, in such a state.
    • Wonder Woman (1987): The Hekatonkheires (Hundred-Handed Ones), especially Cottus who mostly looks like a giant thing made of shadowy hands with a glowing interior and whose spine has been mistaken for stairs by even Wonder Woman herself.
    • Wonder Woman (2006): The khunds are being wiped out by an alien that is completely out of context for them and which slaughters billions of them easily while they are unable to harm it in return. When Wonder Woman gets a look at the situation she realizes that the khunds are being exterminated by Olympians when she sees ichor.
    • Wonder Woman (2011): This version of Poseidon is an enormous teal creature that looks vaguely like a combination of a few octopi, a whale, and some type of pinniped with growths atop his head that look like coral and a giant starfish. There's also a smaller version of himself inside him.
  • Rat-Man
    • One early story had "Cosmicus", a Galactus expy starting to devour the Earth... until from the cracks in the ground sprung thousands of tentacles that began to assimilate Cosmicus in seconds. Only one eye of the mysterious entity was seen, and the narrator stated that this being was as old as the Earth (and implied to be Earth itself), and that the all-powerful Cosmicus was only a part of a far greater food chain. This counts as both Deus ex Machina and Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, since the entity and all of its implications were never mentioned again.
    • The Shadow, a mysterious entity usually acting through envoys of identical looks, names and eldritch powers but that incarnates in a host (the son of the previous one) every thirty years, has caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and now is gunning for mankind. Only superheroes can defeat it, but, between the last host killing most of them and Mr. Mouse causing people to mistrust them, the only one remaining is Rat-Man himself. Oh, and what about the new chosen host, who, at the moment of this post, is trying to avoid being dragged off and forced in the role? It's Rat-Man himself
  • In the Chilean comic Zombies en la Moneda, in the last volume it is discovered that the Zombie Apocalypse that Chile suffers is the responsibility of a powerful, ancient and evil entity (At least, his actions seem to be evil), which uses the vital energy of celebrities and politicians to feed itself and has converted La Moneda in a place full of abominations and walls made of living flesh. In Mision Valparaiso, its sequel, it is discovered that the abomination is actually Augusto Pinochet resurrected in the form of a zombie, or perhaps an Eldritch Abomination that occupies his body. It's a little confusing.

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