Transformation Comic - Television Tropes & Idioms

A Transformation Comic is a Comic Strip or Comic Book which is centered around magical or Applied Phlebotinum transformation of some sort. One variety transforms a main character for the long term, and follows the consequences of this incident; another involves repeated transformation of several characters, and a third variety mixes these. Since transformation as a theme tends to be a niche market, this trope is most prevalent in Web Comics, where there are minimum barriers to content and publication.

While a Transformation Comic might have some Author Appeal or be slanted towards specific Fan Service and/or Fetish Fuel, transformation can also be used to explore such themes as gender roles, racism, feelings of isolation/not belonging, and the maturation process.

For purposes of this page, examples will exclude comics where transformations occur, but are not central to the storyline or themes.

Types of transformation seen in a Transformation Comic include but are not limited to:

Gender Bender - Male to female is most common (Mandys Law Of Anime Genderbending at work), but female to male or either to hermaphrodite are not unknown. This does not include characters who are realistic transsexuals or transvestites, though they may also appear in the strip.
Animal Transformation - Human to either anthropomorphic (furry or kemonomimi) or "normal" animal, or vice versa.
Other Species Transformation - Human to alien or magical being, and vice versa.
Age Change - Both Thirteen Going On Thirty and Fountain Of Youth.
Apparent Ethnicity Change - Black Like Me, White Like Me and so forth. Relatively rare, possibly because Race Tropes are likely to trigger some readers' Berserk Button, and thus it can be easier to deal with them through Fantastic Racism if the author is interested in approaching those subjects.
Mental Change - The character becomes Not Himself.
Mind Swap - Can be any of these, but applied to two characters at once, sticking them with each other's bodies in a Freaky Friday plot.
Characters getting inflated/superfat - Very common too.

If one of the main characters has Practical Magic or Mad Science skills, even more exotic transformations may show up from time to time.

Note that the vast majority of these comics focus on Involuntary Shapeshifting rather than voluntary - either the focus is on a curse on a specific individual, or a few characters who transform others as a habit.

Examples

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Misfile. Ash is a (permanent, so far) Gender Bender, and Emily has been hit with Fountain Of Youth. The latter is a more subtle than usual use of the trope, as she's only "lost" two years. They just happen to have been very important years from her perspective.
Abstract Gender. Brian and Ryan are both Gender Bender; Brian (who likes it) can go back to his original form, while Ryan (who doesn't) can't, a cause of considerable irritation on the latter's part.
El Goonish Shive. Ellen is a permanent Gender Bender,(sort of) though she's taking it better than most. ~~Most~~ All of the main cast has done at least one gender switch, and Grace is a full-fledged Shape Shifter.
- This is really what the comic is made for. Hell, Grace even arranges for everyone to swap genders at her birthday party for the fun of it.
Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki. Yuuki, of course, is a Gender Bender for the long haul. Hermod and Loki are both currently in Animal Transformation, with Loki additionally being a plushie.
The Wotch. The title character and most other magic users in the strip tend to rely heavily on transformation spells. Interestingly, due to the nature of her powers, Anne is unable to be a Gender Bender herself. But she and her friends have undergone many transformations, some voluntarily. A number of supporting characters are permanently genderbent, with a special mention going to Mingmei, who has a trifecta of Gender Bender, Fountain Of Youth and Asian Like Me. She used to have Not Himself as well, but her personality seems to have reintegrated. There are also a werewolf, a werecat, a couple who swap bodies every so often as a Running Gag (and, amusingly enough, she enjoys it and wants to keep it up), and a formerly-human centaur, just in case the gender games weren't enough.
Cheer. A spin-off of The Wotch, featuring a quartet of Gender Bender cheerleaders, as well as an additional White Like Me Gender Bender (Peter Hall) who (unlike three of the other four) knows exactly what's happened to her. All of the Wotch regulars make appearances as well. One of the cheerleaders is fully aware of what happened, but likes herself and her friends better when they don't have excuses to be jerks.
Zebra Girl. The title character is permanently stuck with the body of a demon. Probably the least Fan Service-y example of the genre — the fact that Sandra's every bodily secretion is now incredibly acidic might have something to do with that.
- They did have a quick scene where fanservice was alluded to, but offscreened, early on. Later, some more explicit fanart of the incident was drawn, but nothing too revealing.
You know, for a strip called Urgent Transformation Crisis, it is suprisingly serious about its subject matter. The transformations are usually one-way, less fan-servicey than normal, and the implications are taken far more seriously than in other strips of this nature.
- The fact that the results of a transformation are quite hard to reverse and can seriously effect one's life is probably WHY it's such a crisis.
Troop 37 focuses on a ten-year-old boy turned into a sixteen-year-old girl for reasons that, as a rule, are not to be explained. Written by first caller.
MSF High features frequent transformations (in which the victim always, always winds up female), mostly at the hands of the nurse, or occasionally Lovable Rogue Rainer. The victims have the option of reversing them at the end of the day, but seldom do, for various reasons. The artist of its predecessor, High School Changed Me, quit over, ahem, Creative Differences and later put a Take That in his own strip when a familiar-looking Spear Carrier wishes to be turned into a woman.
By the same author, Discordia is a more low-key strip about a man who's been transformed into a woman. A character also has the power to transform anyone but the aforementioned, but she's an innocent, albeit half-god, little girl, and mostly uses it on command. A consequence of her innocence, however, is that she can't produce a male form - even if the target started that way.
Sailor Sun is about an actor permanently stuck as an actress, who always manages to just miss Those Two Guys switching each others' genders as a prank, and the "actress" playing The Wotch using Gender Bender powers. Not to mention that authorities on the subject have claimed it too risky for some reason.
Accidental Centaurs is Exactly What It Says On The Tin - two humans become centaurs upon entering a centaur-filled world. Originally, there were a few transformations into the world's other beasts and that was it, but a crossover with The Wotch ended with one of the main characters getting some of her powers...and the same basic move.
New World has a large number of magical transformations, most of which involve both genderbending and either age regression or furry transformation (or in the case of Mina, all three at once). It has since been rebooted as a straight Gender Bender comic.
To add to the rather large number of comics tied to The Wotch through some degree, there's Crossworlds, which also began as a side story to Accidental Centaurs. While its plot isn't _entirely_ tied into transformation, the artist uses it often enough that it seems to qualify. (That, and the artist draws transformation art on his other website seems to help.)
Exiern is essentially about a barbarian adventurer, turned into a woman by a sorcerer's spell gone awry. Hilarity and Fan Service ensue in equal measure, as well as other characters transforming in various ways. A sub-comic Dark Reflections, takes the plot and spins it around a bit, as a What If the hero didn't save the princess in time, instead the gender-changed hero/heroine ends up mind-controlled by the Big Bad and becomes his bimbo Dragon.
The fancomic CharCole details a Pokemon journey from the perspective of a human-turned-Charmander.
Synthea is a trope-filled comic about a amnesiac woman ending up in a Stasis pod right before death being woken up in the distant future by a good Mad Scientist using experimental ancient biotech that gave her a body with the consistency of lime jello — a so called Slime-Girl. Synthea gains some powers from the shift — she can change shape at will, stretching, punching, creating mallets, etc, but her control over her body is very limited, as she oozes and drips all over the place. She even has to sleep in a barrel as when unconscious she reverts to a big puddle. She's also apparently physically immortal — she's been cut up, blown up, and vacuumed up by a sapient humanoid vacuum with little more than a headache.
The two sets of webcomics based on Erika's New Perfume are minor forms of this, as they play on the transformations of Marie and Sarah but do not so far include any more from there.
The Dragon Doctors - Four magical doctors, a shaman/therapist, a surgeon, a magical scientist, and a wizard all get their respective genders reversed in the first chapter while trying to cure a cursed valley that causes everything within it to be female. They wind up stuck that way, and deal with that as they continue to diagnose and cure unusual diseases, curses and other problems in a [1] fantasy setting.
Demon Eater Has demons that change form every time they eat another demon. It's a dog eat dog world for reals. Saturno the main character has so far been in 30 different forms and counting.
The Key To Her Heart follows a part-time Gender Bender's relationship with a closeted lesbian, and occasionally features further one-off transformations, especially in dreams. Since it's marketed as an adult comic and has a graphic sex scene at least per chapter, any Fetish Fuel is purely intentional.