Eldritch Abomination/Comic Books

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Ogdru Jahad
  • The Moose from Johnny the Homicidal Maniac has all the looks of this trope, and its initial appearance literally screams this as it tears through Johnny's Torture Cellar, killing everyone, and apparently destroys reality upon reaching the surface. It's later revealed by the Devil that its origin is closer to that of The Heartless; it's an accumulated distillation of negative psychic residues created by humans behaving generally badly. Ain't he cute?
  • 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 Justice League 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.
      • It only took all this because, since this was a Silver Age/Bronze Age story, it had to be visually entertaining. Since then, he's been Retconed to be at Galactus-tier levels. 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 entire 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 stab it with a giant energy stake. This, of course, all takes up about the space of three or four 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 mentioned previously were born from a probe it sent to investigate: Even weirder, it's described as being the embodiment of the very concept of narrative.
    • Darkseid also becomes this during Final Crisis: once Darkseid's original body was killed, he plummeted to Earth and was reincarnated as Dan Turpin. Before long, 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, you ask? He sits on his throne, waiting for reality to die merely because he exists. One parallel universe is actually destroyed this way!
      • This of course has implications for the rest of the New Gods...
    • Imperiex could also be considered one, given that it was the power of the Big Bang who gained physical form and 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. And even then, he had to be sent back to the dawn of time, because the Big Bang itself was the only thing that could finish him off completely.
    • Finally, there's the King of Tears. After Johnny Sorrow is sucked into said dimension by a malfunctioning subspace gun, this extradimensional god pieces him back together and makes him an example as well, contorting his face to a level of hideousness where anything that sees it (barring special circumstances) dies of shock. Johnny Sorrow is made the King's 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's face is usually obscured by blinding light. The one time it is fully seen, however, it's a disgusting mass of tentacles and insectoid limbs. 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.
  • Grant Morrison especially enjoys these.
    • Another member of Starro's species simply called the Star Conqueror appears during Morrison's 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 to stop it -- 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. 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 basically 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 sort of Cosmically Corrupt Executive.
    • The Archons of The Outer Church in The Invisibles are typical Eldritch Abominations -- slimy, chitinous, and decidedly non-human. 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.
    • 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 full of these:
      • Orqwith, a city that doesn't exist and sends out Scissormen to literally cut people out of reality as we know it.
      • Red Jack, a floating head that is just a mask who lives in a pocket dimension mansion 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 and skinless.
      • 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 stopping it 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 then summon of The Candlemaker, a far worse Eldritch Abomination.
    • Mother Dirt, from The Filth. Supposedly, it's the Big Good of the series.
  • 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 literally eaten key moments in time from all but one of them.
    • The 5th Dimensional Imps, of which Superman villain 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 are permitted only to cause mischief. Of course, sometimes hiccups occur, like the time Mxyzptlk made the well-intentioned mistake of giving his reality-reshaping powers to the Joker.
    • One of Alan Moore's early works, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, is set in an alternate possible future where Superman is getting ready to retire - up until something moving at super-speed kills everyone he loves! It turns out: it's Myxy himself, who, as a superdimensional imp older than time, is now bored with being mischievous and 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-Nice Hat image, 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.
    • In one issue, Superman teleports to the Edge of the Universe. Way out there, space becomes white, and after that, there is a massive, infinite wall of Eldritch Abominations and 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.
      • This 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.
    • JLA: Another Nail has the Limbo Cell, a primordial creature that eats existence.
  • 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. Notably, at one point, Lucifer flies out to just in front of the Source mentioned above and totally ignores it. It's simply beneath his notice at the time.
    • The same series has the Jin-En-Mok and the Silk Man, surviours of the destruction of what's described as "an earlier, cruder Creation" and so very horrible in their own, special ways.
  • One played a major role in Cyborg's origin in the comics. While visiting his parents at S.T.A.R. Labs, Victor's mother Elinor accidentally activated the experimental dimensional portal device his parents were working on at the time. The... thing that came through it immediately devoured his mother and mutilated Victor before his father Silas forced it back into its own dimension, but not before the creature gave him a terminal case of radiation sickness. Silas barely managed to save his son using cyborg prosthetics of his own design, but Victor resented him for turning him into a "cyborg freak" for years, believing that his father wanted to experiment on him, until Silas revealed that he was dying thanks to the radiation. This led to Cyborg getting over his bitterness towards his father, and they spent one last day together as father and son before Silas died.
  • The recent[when?] run on 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 (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. The actual entity, Butcher, appears as a bull.
    • Avara, the blue entity of hope, looks basically like a huge eagle... with three faces and beaks.
    • 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.
  • Hellboy is pretty much built on this. Especially the genderless Ogdru Jahad, 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; they can take on the appearance of a normal human being; they possess a 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 Ogdru Jahad's most powerful servants are the Ogdru Hem: 369 lesser abominations, each incredibly powerful in their own right. These include Sadu-Hem, the Conqueror Worm summoned by Von Klempt, and the discorporated entity that possesses the ectoplasmic medium Mr. Tod when he goes off "fishing in the deep-end".
    • Additional Ogdru Hem show up in BPRD--Katha-Hem, who ravages the central United States, and the unnamed creature in the Salton Sea, breathing the upgraded form of the Frogman Plague into the atmosphere.
  • In the Marvel Universe, there are various 'Elder Gods' that count. The most notable of these are Chthon and Set.
    • Dormammu and Shuma-Gorath aren't 'Elder Gods', but far, far more powerful and ancient multiversal threats. The most powerful known regular demon lords are supposed to be as insects to them (and so would Chthon and Set).
    • Zom is 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.
    • 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.
    • Ultimate Gah Lak Tus definitely qualifies. A swarm of city-sized sentient drones, it drives everyone who sees it insane and spreads a flesh eating virus across the planets it consumes, and much of the devastation it causes stems from its own gravitational pull.
    • In the recent Realm Of Kings one-shot, Quasar visited an Alternate Universe which was apparently sold to Dark Gods. Not only does everybody in this world carry an Eldritch Abomination inside one's body, but the entire universe is one in itself. 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 the entire realm into the Cancerverse.

Quasar: I'm Protector Of The Universe. But how am I supposed to protect it from another universe? Planets, stars, whole galaxies that want to crush us all. I asked what's the worst that could happen. This is my answer.

      • The Thanos Imperative event is about the Cancerverse 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. When one thinks about it, it's life itself as an invasive species writ large.
      • And best of all: you know Shuma-Gorath, mentioned above? Word of God states he's a Many-Angled One, i.e. a member of the Dark Gods that rule the Cancerverse. At least it all exploded when Death came back into existence... though given Shuma-Gorath, it's very likely the Many-Angled Ones are okay with that.
    • 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, and 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.
      • Go to the Mythology and Religion page and read about Amatsu-Mikaboshi. That's the same guy.
      • The Chaos King's army is composed of deceased gods he murdered and recreated as his puppets. But one of them is Glory, a gigantic monstrosity composed of thousands of alien pantheons it assimilated into itself. Its nature is so alien and bizarre that even The Mighty Thor was scared beyond words during their encounter. It's an Eldritch Abomination even to gods. It's also one of the few beings that joined the Chaos King willingly, because it enjoys all the destruction he causes.
  • One Donald Duck issue 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.
  • In Watchmen, Ozymandias creates a genetically modified monstrosity designed to look like one of these. It looks like the Sarlacc if Sigmund Freud was in charge of Star Wars.
  • Hack Slash has 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.
  • 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 an entire 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...
  • 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.
  • Some of these were responsible for Ramjet's Lovecraftian Superpowers in the Transformers comics. A servant of Unicron, Ramjet ended up in the creatures' world when his master imploded and 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.
  • The unfinished miniseries A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Beginning would have revealed that the Dream Demons, the masters of main Elm Street antagonist Freddy Krueger and the ones who gave him his powers, were something akin to this. For those interested, the script for the issue that explored their origin is available to read here.
    • Judging by what we see of them in Freddy's Dead, they probably qualify even without this series explaining it.
  • In Ghostopolis, any living person who ends up in the titular city has the potential to become this.
  • The Umbrella Academy has this by way of the team's Dead Little Brother: Ben Hargreeves AKA The Horror. He's a nice guy, but possesses the most unholy and terrifying otherworldly monsters crawling under his skin that occasionally explode out of his stomach.
  • M'Gubgub from Nth Man: The Ultimate Ninja is a galaxy-devouring abomination with a million forms that has to spread its 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 titular memory-eating parasites from Vertigo Comics' Mnemovore, maybe.
  • Many antagonists (especially Bigger Bads) from 2000 AD comic Slaine fall into this - notably, Crom Cruach/Crom Dubh, the patron god of Slough Feg and Medb, as well as Aten (yep, pharaoh Akhenaten's monotheistic sun god), who the Fomorian lord Moloch attempts to summon to Britain through child sacrifices. Speaking of Fomorians, they are a whole species of Humanoid Abominations except for their sea-demon cousins led by Lord Odacon, who are Puppeteer Parasites that look equal parts deep-sea monstrosities and aborted hell-larvae); there are also the pre-human gods called the Cythrons and the Els, who inhabit the various otherworlds. Those races are very unfriendly towards humanity.
  • Back in the 1980s, Alan Moore wrote several stories for Marvel UK's Star Wars comics that pitted the heroes against weird opponents like the Bedlam Spirits and Wutzek, the last Force Demon. Whether or not these are still canonical is disputed (although the presence of Star Wars entities on other subpages of the trope may not bode well for the Galaxy).
  • The super-organism in Bio Apocalypse has a habit of spawning these and might even qualify as one itself.
  • While we don't know much about them yet, The Hunters Three of the relaunched Animal Man appear to be these. Three absolutely horrific creatures who "disguise themselves as men", they are from the edges of the DC Universe according to an interview, and serve a dark force lurking beneath it. Though really, their appearance says it all.
  • The Scott Snyder run on Swamp Thing introduces us to 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 The Hunters Three serve the same dark forces.
  • 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.
  • The Darkwing Duck comic recently had an arc called "The Call of Duckthulu". No points for guessing what it was about.
  • From V for Vendetta comes the omniscient supercomputer FATE, which is worshiped as a living goddess by the fascist dictator Adam Susan. At first glance, it simply appears that Susan is insane and thinks the computer is alive, but then you think... what if it is?
  • "Them" from El Eternauta easily come off as this; the best description we are given is that they are the "cosmic hatred".
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