Forced Transformation / Comic Books

• All Fall Down: Entertaining children in hospital, the shape-shifter Phylum is permanently trapped in the form of a chimpanzee.
• In Amulet, the city of Kanalis has a curse on it, turning anyone that stays there too long into some sort of anthropomorphic animal. The populace is generally okay with this, and just go about their lives as normal, but elsewhere there's shown to be some tension towards those who are animals.
• Astro City:
  • Metallurgist Andrew Wilson was studying an alien artifact when he accidentally released the gas within. A moment later, he is transformed into the self-proclaimed Ore-Master, a ten-foot-tall monster made of earth metals and burning with internal fire.
  • When the heroic Hellhound is infected with Black Velvet's Hate Plague, he involuntarily changes into his gigantic One-Winged Angel form.
• The Authority: In Transfer of Power, the Authority's punishment for the superpowered monster that attacks them (depowered back into a hick) is to take him back home and change him into a flock of chickens... just as the local bar turns out and the locals decide chickens are acceptable sexual partners. "Do you remember when heroes just used to take bad guys to jail?" (In this case, the reason they didn't is because the hick was empowered by G7. Yes, the seven wealthiest governments in the world. His jail stint would have been shorter than Paris Hilton's.) Worse: the locals are actually his brothers, who had just been complaining about a lack of anything to eat.
• In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics, Dawn has been turned into a giant (well, at least she got to stomp Tokyo and fight a giant robot version of herself), a centaur (uh, gave Xander a ride...) and a doll.
• Sersi of The Eternals is the Marvel Universe inspiration behind the legend of Circe, and often temporarily transforms her foes into harmless animals.
• The Eye of Mongombo: Adventurer Cliff Carlson is turned into a duck by a vengeful Witch Doctor named Jumballah.
• Fables:
  • In the comic book, the realm Prince Charming came from had its fair share of cursed folks being turned into all sorts of talking animals. Of course, marriage to royalty would reverse the curse. King and Queen Charming disposed of the more troublesome ones by summoning the cook...
  • Also, in a slight twist a rabbit named Colonel Thunderfoot is transformed into a human by the angry rabbit mother of a soldier who died after Thunderfoot sent him to battle. The terms of course were that Thunderfoot could only be turned back into a rabbit if he found a doe able to see past his appearance and love him. Judging by the end of the chapter, he is in rather bad luck on that score.
• After the Fantastic Four defeat them in issue #2, three Skrulls offer to turn into something else (and be hypnotized into forgetting their previous lives.) They are turned into cattle and put out to pasture. That's not the last we ever hear of the Skrull-cows. The meat they are eventually turned into winds up giving a group of ordinary people superpowers. And cancer.
• Fine Print: When cubi feel genuine love, their horns become gold-tipped similar to a cupid's halo. Since love is taboo to cubi, this can make things very difficult for them. When a cupid feels Lust (or at least desire injected from a cubi's tale), they spontaneously grow horns similar to a cubi's halo. Bauphette calls it the "Crown of Eros."
• Infinite Crisis: During the tie-in Day of Vengeance, The Spectre turns The Phantom Stranger into a rat, since he wasn't powerful enough to kill him. This is The Spectre's general specialty, because The Comics Code Authority wouldn't let him directly commit murder. Generally, the polymorph is such that the transformed person gets killed or destroyed horribly in such a way as to make ordinary murder seem pleasant.
• Isola: Queen Olwyn of Maar has been transformed into a tiger by an evil spell. The premise involves her and her loyal guard captain Rook setting off on a quest to the titular mythical land of the dead to find a way to turn her back.
• Iznogoud: One of Iznogoud's favourite types of scheme involves using a magic spell or object to transform the Caliph into an animal or object. Invariably, the spell will backfire and transform him instead. Just to give a few examples:
  • "Likhwid's Bottle, or the Bottle of Likhwid" has Iznogoud buying an elixir, one drop of which will turn the drinker into a woodlouse. What he doesn't learn until the sale is complete is that it's the last drop in a gigantic jug, and the disgusting elixir itself must be consumed undiluted. The vizier finds various ways to trick/force the Caliph into drinking endless bowls of the stuff, but when there is one drop left, inevitably it is Iznogoud who drinks it and turns into a woodlouse after he faints and the well-meaning Caliph tries to revive him with it.
  • "Kissmet" features one of the classic examples of a Baleful Polymorph: a frog curse that can only be reversed by a kiss which turns the kisser into a frog. Iznogoud is surprised when it takes no subterfuge whatever to get the Caliph to kiss the frog suffering from the curse, whereupon the Caliph turns into a frog and the frog turns into a prince... who decides to claim the throne for himself and have the vizier executed. But the spell has a wrinkle: if a cursed frog kisses a human, both will turn into frogs. By the end of the story, Iznogoud has had to get himself a stay of execution by kissing the frog Caliph, leaving himself, Wa'at Alahf, and the prince all stuck as frogs.
  • "The Doggy Flute" sees the title object used by a Chinese wizard to turn rude people into dogs, so Iznogoud gets hold of it to use on the Caliph. But when he can't remember the tune he needs to play to turn him into a dog, his practising causes polymorphic chaos all over Baghdad, doubly so when he turns the animals back into humans (who are not happy to have been transformed). Unsurprisingly, the story ends with the flute being used to turn Iznogoud himself into a dog.
  • In "Fairy Tale", Iznogoud contracts apprentice fairy Blunderbell to turn him into the Caliph, but she gets it wrong and turns the Caliph into Iznogoud instead, then both Iznogouds into Caliphs, and finally she ends up turning Iznogoud and his (accidentally created) clone into clothes irons.
• Jax Epoch and the Quicken Forbidden:
  • Jax goes through this two times, but both of them are downplayed. In one example, she tried to cast a fire spell, but ended up burning her arm off. She tried to cast a spell to grow her arm, but end up growing a tree bunch (she got better though).
  • In another instance, while Jax was tied up at the bottom of the elevator shaft, her head turns into a balloon by Thomas Lorik in order for her to get the elevator key.
• Lori Lovecraft: The Dark Lady: The future version of Lori transforms a demon from a Rat Folk into an actual, normal sized rat.
• Magic Trixie: In "Magic Trixie And The Dragon", Trixie accidentally turns her baby sister, Abby Cadabra, into a dragon because she had dragons on the brain after visiting the circus. She sees it as the opportunity to finally have a pet dragon, but quickly learns that they're more trouble than they're worth.
• One Mickey Mouse comic had a witch turn Minnie into a lamb by tricking her into eating an enchanted fig.
• The Mighty Thor was turned into a frog on more than one occasion. One time his fellow Avengers were transformed too. Thor groaned "not again..." while Iron Man started freaking out.
• Over the Garden Wall: Aside from Beatrice (cursed as a bluebird), one issue has Wirt turn into a bear and Greg into a duck, with The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body in effect. Subverted—it turns out that animals just took their clothes.
• Oz (Caliber): When a guard tries to prevent the Wicked Witch Mombi from gaining access to the Nome King, she turns him into a newt.
• The Silver Surfer (and other wielders of the Power Cosmic in the Marvel Universe) can do this. The Surfer himself is a pacifist and not prone to whimsy or sadism, so he rarely uses this power to its full potential. When he actually feels like he needs to kill someone, he'll often only do this halfway - take apart their constituent particles without rearranging them into something else.
• The Smurfs: In the story "The Little Tree", Lumberjack Smurf finds out that an elf's sister has been turned into an evergreen tree and spares her from being cut down.
• In Soulsearchers and Company, Arnold Stanley—the original owner of the company—was transformed into a talking prairie dog by an Evil Sorceror.
• Superman:
  • "The Super-Steed of Steel": Back in The '60s, Supergirl owned a sapient horse with magical powers named Comet. As he described to her telepathically, he was originally a centaur in ancient Greece named Biron. The witch Circe gave him a potion to turn him fully human after he prevented an evil sorcerer called Maldor poisoning her water, but by mistake made him fully horse instead due to M Aldor. Later, after meeting Supergirl, he went on a mission with her to the planet Zerox, where a magic spell was cast that turned him into a human, but only while a comet passes through the solar system he is in. As a human, he briefly adopted the identity of "Bronco" Bill, a rodeo trick-rider.
  • In Supergirl (1972) #7, Tony Martyn, a Peace Corps volunteer who Kara has a crush on, is turned into a giant Yeti by evil wizard Orgox.
  • In Supergirl (1982) #23, Kara fights a mutant whose psychic rays can turn people into mutated humanoid animals.
  • It happens to Superman in Action Comics #303 when he's accidentally turned into a horned, flying, humongous Kryptonian snake-monster named Drang while handling a drang egg contaminated with Red Kryptonite radiation.
  • In The Unknown Supergirl, exposure to Red Kryptonite causes Kara to undergo through several embarassing and irritating transformations which jeopardize her secret identity: she suddenly becomes overweighed, later she turns into a werewolf and at the end, she gains a second head.
  • Emperor Joker: After the Justice League — reimagined in this mad world as a bunch of wacky supervillains—teams up to stop the Joker, he turns most of them into dogs.
  • A Mind-Switch in Time: As Euphor's powers increase, he becomes able to transform people into twisted fantasy versions of themselves. He accidentally turns one biker into a Kamen Rider-esque futuristic biker, and he later transforms a Corrupt Corporate Executive, a pickpocket, an enforcer and a woman into a space android, a man-headed dragon, a robot and a witch, respectively.
  • In Strangers at the Heart's Core, Lesla-Lar transforms Fred and Edna Danvers into Zor-El and Allura In-Ze lookalikes as part of her revenge against Supergirl and her family.
  • Death & the Family reveals that Silver Banshee was a human forcefully transformed into an ageless banshee spirit, to her everlasting chagrin, and she has been looking for a way to undo her curse.
• Before Swing with Scooter turned into an Archie clone, its seventh issue featured a story where Scooter and his friends were turned into anthropomorphic vegetables.
• Witch Girls has this occur several times in its comics, notably with Lucinda Nightbane turning a couple of muggers into a frog and fly, and another in which she turns a bully into a two-headed rabbit who she releases into the world to breed.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Circe's most common shtick is turning men into Bestiamorphs against their will. The level of consciousness she leaves the victims varies with her whims, but they are forced to serve her and lose their human forms to become animalistic and monstrous, usually as Mix-and-Match Critters but occasionally looking like an ordinary animal.
  • Wonder Woman (1942): Maj. Keith Griggs stumbles into Circe's jungle abode where she's been transforming men into monsters and animals. She overwrites his mind, turns him into a Satyr and sets him on Wonder Woman.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): In "The Witch and the Warrior" Circe abducts every male superhero her powers detect and turns them into animals and human-animal hybirds and then hunts them down with over 60 female villains. Wonder Woman teams up with most active superhero women to save the day.
• X-Men: The mutant Masque of the sewer-dwelling Morlocks can alter the flesh of anyone he touches, in pretty much any way he can imagine; and he has a very twisted imagination.
• Zatanna loves this. She often does it to punish those who annoy her or deal with enemies, once even casually and (half-) jokingly threatening to turn Batgirl into a toad once if she didn't go on girls night out with her.

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