And I Must Scream / Webcomics

And I Must Scream in Webcomics.

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Creators:

• Ian Samson is a big fan of illustrating "turned into an object" comics. He's done things like having the super-heroine Synthia Stretch trapped forever as a bouncy ball toy. Clayface's daughter losing her ability to control her form and being turned permanently into a clay urn. A girl turning herself into a statue for a whole week to spy on a villain. And possibly most disturbing, a girl whose witch sister has ruined her life by constantly turning her into various articles of clothing. The witch eventually assumes that because she has no friends and no social life (which is all the witch's fault, according to her sister, as she 1. keeps doing this to her and 2. turned all her friends into fish), she must prefer being an object, and decides to stop turning her back into a human. Unable to complain, seeing as how clothes don't have vocal cords, her sister spends the rest of her life trapped as one article of clothing after another.

Comics:

• Sarda from 8-Bit Theater went back to the beginning of the universe, and is forced to wait through every major event in the universe over a period of billions of years. He admitted that the only thing keeping him alive at that point was pure, unadulterated hatred of the Light Warriors.
• Alice Grove: Subverted. Alice's threat to Sedna about burying her in molten magma? Turns out she actually did that to Church at some point before the Blink. He managed to break out, but it took thousands of years to do so, and he apparently still holds a grudge.
• In this strip from Channel Ate, a man who believed in reincarnation ends up in Hell, but the Devil agrees to let him reincarnate... as a statue that can only scream internally.
• Charby the Vampirate: When Cyril sat upon the vampire throne after slaughtering nearly everyone in the palace young Prince Rodericke, who had just witnessed his father's murder at his hands, took up the interloper's own blade and stabbed him through the heart pinning him where he sat. As an elite Cyril sits on the throne where he has been stuck for decades unable to die and reduced to a skeletal form as Rodericke chips away at him collecting shavings.
• City of Blank: When a person's face gets stolen by a Blank, their face turns into a cohesive slab of flesh, covering their eyes, nose and mouth.
• City of Reality deals with a lot of this. Magic World is full of people who, thanks to Hinto Ama, have been transformed into all manner of things, from turtles to clothing to water. At least there's the Manumitor, who goes around saving as many of these victims as he can.
• City of Somnus has at least two examples, one definitely supernatural and one that may not be supernatural (but probably is):
  • The people trapped underground in the Feyn kingdom to keep it running with their creativity. While they're asleep all the time, their collective dream is strongly hinted to be unpleasant.
  • Adazi, a highly trained dream mage who had something mysterious happen to him thirty years prior. His colleague was killed, he barely survived - but remains isolated and heavily medicated all this time, because he's constantly having terrible, crippling nightmares, and his doctors worry this might be infectious. Being accustomed to treating dream mages, they'd know what they're talking about.
• Played for laughs in Commander Kitty when a MOUSE unit is accidentally beamed into space and left there to plot revenge. It winds up back on board through a freak accident.
• Deep Rise has Servitors, macrofauna of the surface, captured, vivisected and rebuilt. much of what we humans would use mechanical devices and computers for, the Nobles prefer an organic solution. Some of them retain a bit of their former minds.
• The Dragon Doctors:
  • Rina, who was Taken for Granite and left for two thousand years in a cave with nobody to talk to and no sensation at all (thankfully, she was only conscious for the first days). Fortunately the eponymous doctors rescued her. The comic also features Tanica, who was accidentally turned into a tree by Sarin. She can communicate with the others through magic, though.
  • Sarin actually was turned into a tree by his/her mentor as a lesson.
  • It's later revealed that a government did this to people who broke their no bodily alterations rule , just in case those people were ever needed. How useful those people would be after years, decades, even centuries as statues is questionable at best.
  • At one point some criminals petrified the crew of a Coast Guard ship and threw them overboard. Not only were they still conscious they could feel the water flooding their lungs so it was like drowning without end.
• In Drowtales, Kharla'ggen of the V'loz'ress clan has a creepy hobby when it comes to dealing with those who catch her fancy or resist. She uses her vast demonic powers to twist and turn their flesh, changing them into living breathing dolls and proceeds to use them to play dress up and snuggle.
• Florence in Freefall has had (mercifully brief) periods like this, thanks to her programming. In one instance, she's ordered to be happy, which does actually make her feel better... emotionally, anyway. On an intellectual level, she's horrified. In a clearer instance, she has her voluntary movement suspended for an upgrade without warning; as soon as she gets it back, she shrieks belatedly.
• Girl Genius:
  • There is a plant that gives off a pheromone (or something) that induces feelings of extreme happiness, and then eats the prey (similar to a Venus Flytrap). Apparently, this plant takes over a year to fully absorb large (read: human-sized) prey. So far, Tarvek and Zola have neglected to mention exactly how quickly death comes for a victim.
  • Captain Vole tells of an experience like this after he's recovered from the Time Stop affecting Mechanicsburg. The process of yanking someone from stopped time into continuity two years past wasn't perfected by then, and he aged two centuries in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. All he remembers from that is feeling like he was stuck in the middle of a fight where he couldn't move fast enough, everything else moved too quick for him to do anything, and he couldn't actually make himself stop. And he thinks he felt (and remembers) every last year of that. After that, the usually Ax-Crazy Vole, the one Jaeger so bloodthirsty he got kicked from the Jaegercorps, states his thirst for battle has been utterly smothered, his usual Jaeger instincts like a taste for hats is gone, and he no longer has any idea what he wants to do after something like that; all like he crossed the line of insanity and looped around to reasonable. Though getting Bored with Insanity does seem to be part of the aging process for Jagers.
• The Helmsman from Homestuck. Formerly the Ψiioniic, ancestor of Sollux and follower of The Signless, he was captured by Her Imperial Condescension when the Signless' rebellion failed. She extended his lifespan indefinitely with her magic, lashed him to her spaceship, and used him as a living battery to massively overclock her ships power. He exists in a state of undying, perpetual agony for thousands of years before he is killed by The Vast Glub.
  • An alternate Calliope suffers this fate after she kills her brother until she makes a deal with Echidna to end her life.
• I'm the Grim Reaper: The fate of anyone sentenced to the last circle of hell, since it's a void completely empty of any sensation or people. It's little wonder Scarlet is so desperate to avoid it.
• In the completed sprite comic In Wily's Defense, Dr. Gabriel Knight was killed in a lab accident, but his soul survived in one of his incomplete robots through some divine intervention. The robot was kept frozen in stasis, unable to move or speak, but Gabriel could still see and hear everything happening in front of him. His wife, also a scientist specializing in robotics, disappeared for a year to mourn. Needless to say, Gabriel had completely lost his marbles by the time the robot was finished.
• Jack by David Hopkins has a short story about a guy who gets offered a very nice apartment for free, ostensibly so he can convince other prospective buyers. The apartment at first seems to be everything promised, but strange things start to happen. He hears strange moaning sounds in the neighboring apartment, and his girlfriend tells him that he can't leave. After inadvertently killing her, a duplicate shows up and tells him nothing in the apartment is real, and that his girlfriend has long since forgotten him and moved to other guys. He takes a sledgehammer and breaks down the wall to find the strange moaning, and finds some sort of strange muck monster that limply chases after him, and he barely escapes through the hole in the wall, which closes itself. The person who sold him the apartment shows up and he demands to know what's going. He is told that the truth is just out the front door, but he won't like it, and there is no going back to the nice apartment he once had. He ignores this and opens the door anyway. He is instantly reduced to a pathetic thing that he saw in the other apartment, too weak to even stand up. The apartment interior turns into plain wood similar to a shack, with nothing but a chair for him to sit on, and the only sound he can make is the moaning he heard earlier. It turns out he's in a particularly unpleasant part of Hell. And he stays there.
• Kill Six Billion Demons: In trying to understand the True Shape of the Universe from the outside, the Demiurge Jadis was struck with a Brown Note of such proportions it drove her mad and entombed her in glass, wherein her immortal but decayed body is trapped for eternity. Because she saw the True Shape Jadis has become The Omniscient and understands everything about the Universe perfectly, including all her own thoughts and actions in advance. Trapped by her own knowledge of everything and incapable of doing anything about it, Jadis' most fervent desire (if Word of God is to be believed) is to die, yet remains thoroughly aware she won't until the already-written story that her life has become dictates she does - all she can do is watch and wait as a tale she knows by heart and hates unfolds at its own pace.
• The backstory to at least one character in morphE. Between days there are dream sequences that reveal piece-by-piece how the seedlings came to be inside crates. One character in the second sequence was depicted as hanging by their wrists against a wall, too weak to do much more than kick off the wall and hit their back on the rocks behind. Their narration explained that their stomach was all but eating itself from hunger and their throat was too dry for them to speak beyond a husky whisper. The only candidates for this trauma both spent over 4 months between their kidnapping and escape. Hanging. Alone. Unable to die.
• In Namesake, Selva, the Wicked Witch of the East, turned the Munchkin King into a hat box and Selva herself is turned into a purse.
• Nedroid: Described in the Alt Text of this comic:
  "It grows from here. Reginald begins reducing more and more actions to simple lines of dialogue: "nod", "dance", "laugh", "love". Eventually his muscles atrophy; his body wastes away. Only the left hemisphere of his brain remains alive, the spoken word itself reduced to mere thought. And once Beartato earns his master's degree and invents a brain-to-speech synthesizer, that final thought is at last heard: "Weep a single tear for the life I have wasted."
• Nuzlocke Comics: In Goddamn Critical Hits, this is what being a Cascoon is like. You can't move, speak, eat, or do anything until you evolve. Dusty the Dustox was one, and it's the primary reason for his loathing of Poké Balls ("I have spent half of my life in a dark, cramped jail, and I do not intend to inflict that on myself ever again!").
• The Order of the Stick:
  • Start of Darkness, one of the prequels, initially plays this straight, when Xykon traps the soul of Lirian the druid in a magic gem, raises her corpse as a zombie, and threatens to feed the zombie to an ogre, thinking that it will drive her insane. Later subverted when he traps the soul of her lover Dorukan in the same gem. Because Evil Cannot Comprehend Good, he accidentally creates a You Are Worth Hell situation instead.
  • Later, in the main comic, Crystal. After Haley kills her, Bozzok turns her into a flesh golem, spending extra money to make her self-aware and retain her memories and skills, but not her lack of focus. The new Crystal exists in constant pain, and is entirely focused on killing Haley, whose fault she thinks her state was. When Haley points out that it was really Bozzok's fault, Crystal turns against him and kills him.
• In Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger when neural templating was first developed the researchers were thrilled to discover that the "snapshot" they'd taken was conscious so they eventually hooked up inputs and outputs to it in order to communicate. Then they heard the screams.
• In Romantically Apocalyptic, Snippy and the Biomatrix take over La Macabre's body by spreading through it; when it continues to scream death threats at them, Snippy, at his wit's end from a particularly bad day, shuts off some of its' functions so that it's deaf and mute too, while still totally aware. It's difficult to feel sorry for La Macabre, considering it was an Attention Whore Serial Killer.
  Snippy: Serves him right. Jerk.
• Ruby Quest: Arguably everyone (given that they're trapped in a cycle of mutation, insanity, death, and resurrection), but the ones who really fit it are Jay and Bella. Bella was not exposed to the Cure. This means she's the Only Sane Man of the facility, but she also doesn't have the regenerative powers the Cure grants, and for about a year she's been trapped at her station by heavy life support. She can't move away, but she does have a window to the outside world- the outside world she'll never be able to reach. She aids Ruby and Tom in their quest so they can reach her and finally kill her. Jay was at some point trapped in the water filtration system by hooks. He's the reason the faucets in the Metal Glen pour blood. Jay eventually gets a happy ending. Bella gets a Mercy Kill.
• Sandra and Woo: When Larisa is filling out a contract with the Devil she finds a space for "three things I wish upon my worst enemy". She goes with "immobility, insomnia, and immortality."
• Schlock Mercenary had an AI disconnected from the mainframe, but still left running, with no sensor input and no way to control anything or alert anybody to her predicament. A.I.s in that universe operate so fast that they don't experience time the same way as humans do; a few seconds of real time is like millennia for them. This AI is left in this state for several hours, which seem like endless eons to her, while everyone else is unaware of her situation. By the time she is finally reconnected, she has gone murderously insane.
  Tagii: Sartre said "Hell is other people". Lucky human. He was never alone.
  • The true horror of that scene is that we see the character apparently drowning herself. What we see here is what happens when the desire to die and the Third Law of robotics combine with extended isolation.
• Slightly Damned has Hell, a place of eternal personalized torment. It isn't that bad when you consider you could also end up in the Ring of the Slightly Damned, an almost entirely empty wasteland of nothing but rocks and mountains. And the only three known occupants have left the Ring, one dead and the other two in the world of the living.
• Sluggy Freelance
  • Played for Laughs with Zombie-Head-On-A-Stick, who's Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Originally, she was called Jane and was granted the "you can live forever, but your body can still decay" kind of immortality; she could keep from decaying away by consuming the parts of other people that she wanted to retain — she made a point to eat brains to keep smart but could not help decaying outwardly to the point of looking like a zombie. Then someone she made very angry left her to decay away slowly, trapped under a pile of debris with only her head showing. This was played seriously, but after Torg found her, she became the ZHOAS, a barely articulate head-without-a-body, filled with an all-consuming hunger she can never satisfy, and doomed to be the plaything of bored idiots. Sometimes, she even seems to enjoy being part of the crazy team, but other time's, she's attempted suicide with her very limited means.
  • A much more serious version: A sympathetic character kept alive indefinitely by advanced medical technology but too hurt to be healed or for the pain to even stop, suffering from the same extreme agony permanently whenever conscious. It makes the "must scream" part literal. You can read more, but the spoilers are huge. In the end of the chapter "bROKEN", Riff and Zoë are caught inside Riff's pilotable mecha when it's engulfed in flames from the inside. Zoë gets the full effect of the flames while Riff uses the emergency button that sends them away into a random alternative dimension. Next, he's seen cradling her horribly burnt form, after which he's captured and finds himself a citizen in a dystopian high-tech city. He starts looking for her, and eventually Brian Rammer, a rebel against the dystopian government, reveals to him that she has been kept alive by the medical nanotechnology in the city, and someone is keeping her alive still, but she's too hurt to be healed and spends her few conscious moments in agony. Riff becomes even more determined to find her, but this time in order to kill her. Then it's revealed to be a Subverted Trope, as Rammer lied. He has his own agenda and does not know Zoë's current state, but he knows the medical nanites can heal almost anything. Rammer showed Riff a video from the time Zoë was still in pain while she was being healed right after she arrived, wanting to motivate him to look for the leader of the city and overthrow them.
• Trolls in Stand Still, Stay Silent are humans who undergone Viral Transformation by Rash Illness and turned into twisted, vicious, murderous monsters. Chapter 3 revealed that they are still conscious. After ninety years.
• Tales of Greed: "1 Minute" is about a watch that gives a person three opportunities to rewind time by one minute each day. Using the watch after that induces a "Groundhog Day" Loop. At the end of the story, the protagonist is kidnapped, and the captor kills him before activating the loop in his watch, forcing him to relive the pain of death over and over again.
• TwoKinds: The title of page from chapter 14 gives this trope word for word (you have to hover your cursor over the page to read it). The context? The ship's owner accuses a slave of starting a fire aboard his vessel, and insists (against everyone's wishes) on snapping on a collar that's used as a means of control, effectively removing his free will, and even ability to think normally.
• In Verlore Geleentheid, Jane Onoda was in cryogenic stasis for 10,000 years but, due to a computer glitch, she and the others on her ship were conscious the whole time. The only reason she stayed (somewhat) sane is that the ship's computer kept her occupied with battle scenarios against the species that nuked her homeworld.
• This sort of thing happens way too much in The Wotch. Scott has been transformed into an immobile, conscious statue three times so far, though it didn't last very long. Rosetta wasn't so lucky, as she got turned into a statue by a crazy wizard, kept that way for some time, then released after said wizard's Heel–Face Turn — but then she was turned back into a statue by a basilisk without anyone knowing what happened to her. It's been mentioned that some statues in museums and mannequins in department stores are transformed people. And some people consider this a humorous comic.
  • This also almost happened to a demon early in the comic's run...before the Big Bad and The Dragon rescued him.
• We Live In An MMO?! has this in the form of NPCs; being set in an RPG Mechanics 'Verse the world has several characters who are considered "NPCs" and provide support to the players. However the NPCs are unable to resist performing these duties or even protest against them, and are utterly at the mercy of the players. One NPCs, the "Events Lady" is sexually harassed by a group of players and not only unable to fight back, she's unable to even stop smiling. Most disturbingly, when Lu was an NPC she was forced to hunt down and kill both players and NPCs. And in the latter case, they weren't even able to stop parroting their lines and actions even as she murdered them.
• xkcd: In "Voice", somebody has apparently fallen victim to a Body Snatcher and can only control their voice for one brief moment every six years.
• In The Zombie Hunters, the Basilisk zombie possesses an automatically paralysing bioluminescent gaze. Any human that locks eyes with a Basilisk will suffer a painful seizure and become immobilized. The victim then has no choice but to lie there helplessly as the zombie closes the distance to feed. Slowly. Starting with the face.

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