Eldritch Abomination/Web Comics

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See that little thing few of the tentacles points at? That's it's mouth. It's currently eating a whale.
See that little thing few of the tentacles points at? That's it's mouth. It's currently eating a whale.

Examples of Eldritch Abominations in Web Comics include:

  • Ow, My Sanity features an Unwanted Harem of good old Lovecraftian abominations who take human female forms.
  • Gunnerkrigg Court: Judging by Kat's reaction upon seeing him, the insect-Guide Ketrak apparently looks like something from Lovecraft's nightmares. But he's quite friendly once you get to know him.
    • Also how Coyote and Ysengrim look in the ether. Coyote in particular can best be described as a starry night sky with lots of teeth and eyes. When Annie sees them she is left in awe by how magnificent, beautiful and terrifying they are.
    • At the start of year 9, the girls meet a giant Merostomatazon--basically a horseshoe crab from your nightmares, with 47 eyes (and 15 not-eyes) and a brain that functions in a different dimension. Her name is Lindsey. Not only is she friendly, but she has a Ph.D in structural physics and she's an accredited couples therapist.
    • In a guest comic, Zimmy is something like this — an oculist goes all Abdul Al-Hazred after looking into her eye.
  • Schlock Mercenary: The Paa'nuri fall pretty neatly into this, being entities made entirely of Dark Matter, and can only be detected by traditional matter through the gravitic disturbances they generate and also use as weapons. One is only ever "seen" on a gravy-screen. To give some idea of just how implacable and beyond normal life they are: It's implied by one joke that either their term for other races translates directly as "annoying", or they don't actually have a word for other races and just call them annoying. On a less comedic front, they engaged in a long-term plan spanning over a hundred-thousand years to wipe out the Milky Way galaxy and everyone in it, apparently due solely to a grudge they had been holding for at least four million years.
    • The final story arc gives their reason for this: "baryonic" life had been killing them by using teraport technology to travel FTL. It was an "us or them" situation.
  • The Mind Wedgier from Sluggy Freelance. "To a Mind Wedgier, our flesh is a crunchy candy shell to the nougat center of our spirit."
  • In Dominic Deegan, it's revealed that the Infernomancer has become one...
    • ... but he is nothing compared to his master, dubbed the Beast. Appearing as a gigantic eye, tentacles, and many, many teeth, its nature is so alien that it is effectively invisible to Dominic's Second Sight. Dominic, one of the most powerful seers alive and a master of mental combat, further empowered by Luna's Black Magic, was barely able to fight off a tiny fragment of the Beast that tried to claim Celesto Morgan's soul.
    • And how do you deal with an Eldritch Abomination? You get advice from an expert - specifically Miranda's mentor, and from what else we've seen she's the only archmage who isn't one.
  • The Order of the Stick:
    • The Snarl is an incomprehensible being born from deific rage and strife, kept in check from destroying the world and the gods only by five two measly gates. He's depicted as nothing but lines of blue and purple energy in a very vaguely humanoid form.
    • Given his immense power and currently unknown nature, the Monster in the Darkness is probably one too, although he's really a big softy at heart, as we saw from his relationship with O-Chul.
  • 8-Bit Theater:
    • The Cultists worship and summon eldritch abominations on a regular basis: First there's a nameless creature referred to as an "eye-stalk" which Mind Rapes anyone that makes eye contact with it (in addition to transporting the victim to its own pocket dimension). Then there's major enemy Ur/Jnn'efur, who fits the "fragment of the true being" bill.
    • Early in the series, it's revealed that the reason Black Mage must wear a hat that conceals his face is that he is a human nexus of dark energy and seeing his visage for only a moment would... well, do this. The few times he drops the Idiot Ball are downright scary, and it's implied he could potentially destroy the universe.
    • Sarda may also qualify, having a non-linear view of time and being older than the universe. Chaos is definitely this, and emerges from Sarda's mortal shell.
    • The epilepsy llama. Even Sarda's not 100% sure what it is.
  • And then, there's The Unspeakable Vault of Doom. Yum Yum!
  • Shadowgirls takes direct inspiration from Lovecraft for its portrayal of the occult, most obviously in the character of Mother Hydra.
  • The first radio play in Girl Genius mentions extradimensional abominations coming out of a well, leading directly to low rents.
  • Though they don't really appear in the comic proper, this tidbit concerning cubi dream surfing reveals that these creatures do exist in the world of Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures.

 Fa'lina: Cubi aren't the only creatures who can lurk into dreams...

Gravehouse:'"I crawled into his body and ate him up from the inside out. Until all that was left was skin and memory. Tell me... would you like to meet the real me?

 Helix: Remember to keep your helmet on when you're photographed. They had to take your picture down in the post office because it gave seeing-eye dogs heart attacks.

 Wonderella: Meet Spirral. Duder's a 300-story thingy who travels the galaxy, mind-controlling millions with his Spirral Spores.

  • The Sisters Of Twilight from Mindmistress. They're much older than Elder Gods and things they can do to you are horrifying.
  • Joel from Concession becomes something like an Eldritch Abomination when he is influenced by his sister Miranda's power. There is some hidden background material that suggests all ghosts become these eventually.
  • Some of Lovecraft's Elder Gods make an appearance in the Games We Play In Hell arc of Jack.
  • The Perry Bible Fellowship, naturally, has its own cynical take on the subject.
  • Captain SNES has The Sovereign of Sorrow. In a multiverse of Super Nintendo games, she easily shrugs off attacks from final bosses, destroys game worlds in a few minutes, and most terrifyingly of all, reveals to characters that all their life's hardship has been created for the entertainment of others. Mortals are only capable of interpreting her form; only Gods cab see her for what she is. Her mission: mercy killing the entire multiverse.
  • In The Salvation War setting, according to Word of God, whatever lives on the opposite side of the Minos Portal in Hell (the portal through which the human dead arrive in Hell) exists in a reality so different and alien that nothing from either "Universe-One" (Earth) or any of the "Universe-Twos" (Heaven, Hell, and other assorted "higher-level" realities) can exist on it. Nothing either living or mechanical from either set of universes that passes through the portal has ever returned.
  • The Deepspawn "eventually undergo a radical mutation, growing and hardening into a vaguely serpentine, coiling behemoth best described as a horrific combination of squid and serpent. Mottled exo-skeletal plates and supple, strong muscle extend along a long, ridged, coiling body, ending in a fierce head with an expanding four-pronged beak or maw. Several clusters of ferocious barbed tentacles serve as limbs, each glowing with fell energies, and especially ancient specimens' fins expand to the size of vast wings. The many eyes of the abhorrent head are portals into a soulless -- but dreadfully aware -- abyss."
  • The Insidious Bogleech uses the concept often in his on-site comic strip, cartoons and other drawings.
    • Most notably out of his Mortasheen series of monsters, everything under the Unknown section fits this, from the Vault (which can go through solid matter like it was nothing and is spawned from Alien Geometries) to the Lobotomask (a horrible face-type thing that eats your mind).
  • The Holders Series is incredibly fond of this trope.
  • Popsicle Pete is a goofy ginger with a shit-eating grin in what appears to be a marching band outfit, originally created by Popsicle to advertise their wares. Then Seanbaby got a hand on the ads he was featured in. Now in Seanbaby's Cracked comics, he is... still a goofy ginger with a shit-eating grin in what appears to be a marching band outfit, but rather than offering frozen treats, he offers unimaginable terror and suffering. N
  • In DC Nation, an OC definitely fits the bill. His home reality does to our standards, but consider how his world sees him: he has powers it cannot control, he can shapeshift, teleport, bend his physical abilities to Beyond the Impossible levels, and was so dangerous to that reality that it caused a Zombie Apocalypse and then shunted him to the reality of DC Nation... and wiped his name from all existence, so that no one left in his reality could call him back. His pseudonym of Shift seems to be working well enough now, though. His horrible PTSD from the zombies however has made him into a mumbling lunatic. At least he's a good guy.
  • New York Magician: Hello, Cthulhu!
  • From Something Awful Zoofights, we have Swanmass. It starts out as a bunch of swans with gorilla arms, but after the Zoofights people reanimate it with Black Magic, it gets much, much worse.
  • In the Global Guardians PBEM Universe, Lovecraft was right, sort of; he just got the details wrong. The Great Old Ones invaded this reality at the beginning of time, were imprisoned by the Powers That Be (or at least the Powers That Were at the Time), and in modern day the heroes have to deal with their remnants, their cultists, and their attempts to reinvade reality.
    • Dagon, an evil sorcerer, is a primordial sea-god fused into the body of a modern human. It even resembles a mind flayer from Dungeons and Dragons. Just seeing him tends to make people very, very uncomfortable.
    • The Cthonians, the mortal descendants of the Great Old Ones, want to free their ancestors from their mystic prisons. The heroes naturally think this is a bad idea.
  • In Freeman's Mind, Gordon thinks the bullsquids look like these, often referring to them as Cthulhu Dogs.
  • H-M Brown's Shell introduces us to a strange creature that is difficult to describe and has led those who saw it into madness.
  • El Goonish Shive:
  • Darumatha, the Demon-Dragon of Broken Hours (with a name like that...) in The Water Phoenix King. It might appear in the form of one of your dead friends, fatal injuries and all, or it might take its real form of a vast serpentine coil of living metal scales, fangs, and spikes reaching all the way to the outer stars, a manifestation capable of making strong men vomit in terror, or as a charming young woman in evening dress who prattles cheerfully on about cutting hearts out. Or just go back and forth between all these shapes, apparently at random. It's really hard to say which is the worst!
  • Magicandphysics has SPDA, who goes fishing for Eldritch Abominations. That's right fishing for them. Why? Because he wants to dissect them for fun.
  • Homestuck:
    • The Horrorterrors of the Furthest Ring befit the classic definition of vast monsters of varying forms of hideousness and deformity, with plenty of tentacles. There's probably hundreds of them, arranged in several tiers of power, the strongest being the Noble Circle of Horrorterros. They can communicate with the Derse dreamers of every session of Sburb owing to the Eldritch Location nature of the Furthest Ring, and are intended to provide some level of guidance. In the kids' session, Rose - previously well-read in their lore - channels their power through her Thorns of Oglogoth and it proves to have a less-than-desirable effect on her sanity; on Earth, the cartoon series Squiddles! is actually mankind's subconscious representation of the Horrorterrors, and Rose wears a repurposed Squiddles! shirt.
    • This is pretty much what they look like. Watch it until the very end. And keep in mind, something is somehow mass-murdering these things. they just want to be tangle buddies
    • To give an idea on scale, read on for a few pages from here. That is a whale it is eating. It is merely an emissary to the Horrorterrors.
  • Guttersnipe features H.P. Lovecraft as a sort of 1920s Stephenie Meyer, complete with eldritch abominations standing in for sparkly vampires.
  • Goblins:
    • The horrifying Mr. Fingers. Who just got loose. And that's just part of the problem... Later it is detailed to be know as a Lesser Finged Horror. Which implies the existence of its bigger brothers.
    • Soulspike Devourer, a monster who isn't anything close to Eldritch Abomination in any other Dungeons and Dragons setting, is one here. Why? Because it's a 4th Edition monster in a world based on 3.5 Edition rules, which means the rules of the Universe doesn't work on this thing. It can just grab a person and eat its soul, because it's so different from known rules that there is no saving throw against it.
  • Apparently, in a Dinosaur Comics Alternate Universe that's the result of For Want of a Nail, gazing upon T-rex and Utahraptor's true colours would cause one to Go Mad From the Revelation.
  • Randy, the eternal, from Questionable Content.
  • xkcd features Sheeple.
  • The Packrat has the Demon of Waste (December 2010).
  • Space monsters are known to exist in the world of The Adventures of Dr. McNinja. They're planet sized. People who know of this pray they don't notice the earth.
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