Eldritch Abomination / Comic Books

Ogdru Jahad, The Seven Who Are One.

And when the Bomb exploded a rupture ocurred and something impossible entered the universe, downloading into our reality the 2nd of July, 1947 at Roswell, New Mexico. [...] Try to understand this impossible "IT", as an Angel, a God, fallen into the world it had created.

— The Invisibles vol. 2 # 4, the description of the Roswell Incident.

Eldritch Abomination in Comic Books.

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The following have their own pages:

• The DCU
• Marvel Universe

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• 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.
• 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 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.
• The Darkwing Duck comic had an arc called "The Call of Duckthulu". No points for guessing what it was about.
• 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.
• 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.
• Mother Dirt, from The Filth. Supposedly, it's the Big Good of the series.
• 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).
• 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 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  Genius Bonus here. Its design looks like what Morrison described during a spiritual awakening in Kathmandu, in which they saw "pentadimensional mercurual hyper-sprites" that are essentially 5D humans.
  • 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.
• 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 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.
• 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.
• In Nameless (2015), Grant Morrison pits a small team of astronauts against one , or possibly several ancient beings imprisoned on a gigantic asteroid. It doesn't help that the asteroid is designated Xibalba, the Mayan Underworld.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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
• 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).
• 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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