Eldritch Abomination / The DCU

Eldritch Abominations in the DCU.

• 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 eaten key moments in time from all but one of them.
• Animal Man
  • In the end, the Hunters Three of the New 52 run are subversions. Three absolutely horrific creatures who "disguise themselves as men". According to interviews, the three of them are from the edges of the DC Universe and serve a dark force lurking beneath it. Though, really, their appearance says it all. But the Hunters Three turn out to be ordinary people after Maxine frees them of their corruption. The Rot itself is actually the natural force of death and decay corrupted by Anton Arcane, an all too human villain.
  • A more conventional Eldritch Abomination is the Antagon, from Tom Veitch's run, the sentient dark side of the morphogenetic field that serves as the opposite of the Animal Masters: While the Animal Masters are in charge of creating animals, the Antagon only wishes for the death of animal life. Trapped 10000000000 years ago by the Animal Masters inside a cocoon, Stone and a young and inexperienced Buddy Baker tried to destroy it but it had grown to strong and resistent. Years later it reemerged, first causing A-Man's powers to malfunction and later possessed ex-superhero B'wanna Beast, and began destroying Vermont. It recquired all the Animal Masters and avatars of the morphogenetic field to use the Source to remake the universe to finally destroy the Antagon once and for all.
• Aquaman: One Brave and the Bold story showed an race of Lovecraftian gods, the Night Gods, who lives at the bottom of the sea and once a year try to kill all life on Earth. Aquaman and Etrigan tend to team up to send them back to its home dimension. Yes, Aquaman not only punches out Cthulhu, he beats the ever loving crap out of of several of them on an annual basis.
• The Batman mythos, while being pretty grounded in reality (Safe for some more fantastical villains like Ra's al Ghul) still has shown us a couple beings who are truly weird.
  • The Joker himself might be one of these. It's been sugested a few times that the Joker could not be as human as he appears. He's a being of pure chaos and death and not only is his origin and identity a complete mystery to even the most powerful agencies in the DCU, but he has survived things that would have killed normal humans. Darkseid War implies that he might be Gelos, the Greek God of Laughter (Not the kind of laughter you get out of a funny comedy, but rather the mocking cackle of an insane warrior befre he slaughters his enemy), while Batman: Endgame left ambiguous if he was a Really 700 Years Old unkillable horror that has been tormenting Gotham City since its foundation.
    • In Emperor Joker Mr. J absorbs a huge part of Mr. Mxyzptlk's powers, and turns into a Reality Warper Omnicidal Maniac that traps Superman in a backwards world and Batman in various degrading deaths.
  • Man-Bat became a disgusting Animalistic Abomination with ties to the Red controlled by an even worse Eldritch Abomination in Justice League Dark.
  • Mister Bloom might be the most eldritch Batman villain yet. The Big Bad of Gordon's tenure as the Bat, he looked like a very tall and lanky creature with a The Blank face featuring a yellow flower and sharp reptilian-like claws, and shows New Powers as the Plot Demands, including sizeshifting, ice manipulation and technokinesis. Although initially presenting himself as a Botanical Abomination, his origin reveals him to be a Transhuman Abomination, who once adquired his powers in an illegal metahuman experimentation camp, that also left him able to grow "seeds", Botanical Abominations in their own right that can empower anyone with similar powers but also leaves them as puppets under Mr. Bloom's mind control.
  • In Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, the Arkham family was cursed with a demonic Bat entity that caused Amadeus Arkham's mother to commit suicide (Although she was actually killed by Amadeus), passing the curse onto Amadeus, which manifested in Mad Dog Hawkins raping, murdering and eating his wife and son, which drove him insane and had to be locked in his own asylum, where he tried to do a ritualistic spell to bind the Bat into the Asylum, cursing it to become an Eldritch Location with a demon inside it. On the 1st of April, the Asylum became a focal point of so much madness that, with a bit of help from Doctor Destiny, sent ripples through time and actually cursed the Arkhams in the first place with the Bat. The reason Gotham is such a Wretched Hive is because of the curse of the Bat. The story implies that either Dr. Cavendish or Batman himself could be the latest incarnation sent to torment Arkham.
  • Doctor Simon Hurt is ultimately a subversion. Initially he hyped himself as "the hole in things", "the piece that can never fit", "there since the beginning", "evil incarnate" and a man opposed to the platonic concept of good itself, with plenty of evidence to back the possibility that Hurt might be some sort of archetypal form of evil, to the point he was speculated in and out of universe to be the actual Devil. The Black Glove, the secret group he controls, also seemed to be just as wicked and evil as him, a centuries old secret Cult of untouchable millionaires hell bent on the triumph evil over good. However, the Black Glove in the end are revealed to be little more than bored millionaires with too much power and Dr. Hurt is a textbook example of Big Bad Wannabe and Small Name, Big Ego: He is just a rich sociopath who became immortal through a demonic ritual, which makes him a low-grade Humanoid Abomination at best, and who underestimates both Batman, who simply won't give up; Dick Grayson and Damian Wayne, who are just as capable superheroes as Bruce Wayne; the Joker, who is much more dangerous and difficult to control than Hurt can anticipate and Talia al-Ghul, who is the one actually controlling the secret powerful conspiracy he hypes the Black Glove to be.
  • The Hyper-Adapter, also from Morrison's run, is a giant Starfish Alien weapon holding a great part of the Omega Effect that Darkseid released out of an Ancient Box, sent to track Batman through time (He had become a bit of a living paradox after his death at Darkseid's hands) and kill him. He was so unstoppable that the only thing that managed to defeat him was sending him to Vanishing Point (The last moment in time before the end of the universe), having him beaten by the JLA and then sending him back to the past, and that didn’t even kill him, just shoo him away.
    • Some masterfully done Arc Welding between Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, Final Crisis and Batman (Grant Morrison) reveals that the demon that Simon Hurt summoned was actually the Hyper-Adapter itself, and that the Hyper-Adapter was also the demon Barbatos (Or at least a fragment of it). After being sent tumbling through time it not only inspired Hurt to do the ritual in the first place but also became the Bat that tormented the Arkhams and was trapped in Gotham by Amadeus' spell. The bat that crashed through Bruce's window and inspired him to become Batman in the first place might have actually been Barbatos too meaning that in a certain way, Batman really is the latest incarnation of the Bat entity. This also means that Dr. Hurt isn't just possessed by a demon, he has a piece of Darkseid inside him (this was later confirmed when Bruce Wayne mentioned Darkseid was trying to reincarnate inside the Doctor), and considering what Darkseid really is and what he represents, this double subverts the Doctor's claims of eldritchness, since Hurt more or less truly is both "evil incarnate" as he claimed and also is the Devil.
  • Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham, being an Homage of the Cthulhu Mythos turns various characters into more eldritch versions of themselves.
    • Mister Freeze is portrayed as a man who was driven mad and transformed into an undead-being that freezes everything around him, obsessed with unleashing his dark master.
    • While Pamela Isley was an eco-terrorist that gave herself Green Thumb powers in the mainstream DC-universe, here Poison Ivy was a potted plant turned into a Botanical Abomination by Ra's al Ghul.
    • Ludvig Prinn was originally a necromancer who supposedly lived to be 500 years old, having authored his own evil spellbook. Here, he was a cultist who, after being imprisoned in the catacombs beneath Gotham, became a reptilian monster.
    • His father having been cursed with immortality from the Testament of Ghul, Batman is revealed to be one. He's The Chosen One destined to thwart Ra's al Ghul's plan of summoning Iou-Sotha and permanently transforms into Man-Bat to accomplish this.
    • The story also features an elder god called Iog-Sotha, a massive mass of fins and tentacles who created life on Earth. We also briefly see its equally Lovecraftian son frozen in ice.
• Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol was practically made of these. Orqwith, a city that doesn't exist and sends out Scissormen to cut people out of reality as we know it. Red Jack, who lives in a pocket dimension mansion with a floating head that is just a mask 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 with no skin. 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 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 the summoning of The Candlemaker, a far worse Eldritch Abomination, to stop it. The following run by Rachel Pollack under the Vertigo imprint didn't come short, introducing such beings as the Master Cleaner, a tall man with a fetus in an artificial womb for a head obsessed with stripping down the world to nothing in order to "clean" it, or the Teiresiae, a race of fluid fairy-like beings from a pre-language world who serve as the Anthropomorphic Personification of change itself.
• The Flash: The Black Flash is a black corpse in a ragged Flash costume (Hinting at him being a reanimated Barry Allen) that serves as The Grim Reaper for speedsters, collecting their souls when they die and using them as fuel for the Speed Force. While not evil per se, its Blue-and-Orange Morality make it a very dangerous enemy that has threatened Wally West multiple times. There's also the implication in Final Crisis and Darkseid War that it's related to the Black Racer, the Anthropomorphic Personification of death for the New Gods... who at the same time seems to be just an aspect of Death of the Endless, who has her own entry below.
• 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 Ophidian (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. Adara, the Blue Entity of Hope, looks like a huge eagle... with three faces and beaks; while 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.
  • Another group of eldritch beings, the Empire of Tears, used to rule a large part of the universe until the Guardians overthrew them and imprisioned their spirits inside grotesque bodies in the hellish planet Ysmault, eventual base of the Red Lanterns. When Abin Sur arrived on Ysmault, Qull of the Inversions tempted him with knowledge of the future, and told Abin of the prophecy of the Blackest Night and of Abin's own death (Which is strongly implied to have become a Self-Defeating Prophecy). Fridge Horror applies here: Is the Empire of Tears related in any way, shape or form to the King of Tears, who has his own entry below?
• Kid Eternity: Grant Morrison reinvented the Lords of Chaos from gods to demonic creatures who seeked to bring about the next step on human consciousness through Chaospheres that seem to be responsible for the boom in metahumans. Their mooks, the Shichiriron, are also uncanny hellspawns in their own right, specially once they manifest through cubist-abstract Picasso paintings. The following Ann Nocenti run also introduced Doctor Pathos, who possibly is one too.
• Hellblazer: John Constantine met and defeated two Lovecraftian gods from different story arcs. Jallakuntilliokan, a two headed dragon/floating meat who eats reality, and M'Nagalah, who is the god of cancer. The Triumvirate of Hell also counts, being a group of impossibly old Hell-Lords composed of the First of the Fallen (Who claims to be the original fallen angel, even older than Lucifer), the Second of the Fallen (Who looks like a living mass of viscuous shadow) and the Third of the Fallen (A particularly cruel shapeshifting demon).
• 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 DC: The 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. 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 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 stake it with a giant energy stake. This all takes up about the space of 3 or 4 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 were born from a probe it sent to investigate: meaning it's responsible for two eldritch abominations already. And, even weirder, it's described as being the embodiment of the very concept of the narrative.
  • Imperiex is the power of the Big Bang given form, who 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.
    • 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. Lord Genome's got him beat, though.
  • Finally, there's the King of Tears, an extradimensional god who, after Johnny Sorrow is sucked into said dimension by a malfunctioning subspace gun, pieces him back together and contorts his face to the point where it is so hideous that anything that sees it (barring special circumstances) dies of shock, and makes him his 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 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.
    • Johnny Sorrow himself is one. His normal appearance is invisible, nothing seen around the mask or sleeves of his mostly-full-body-concealing costume. When he takes off his mask, his true face will indeed kill, and those who do survive do not survive unscathed and are pretty powerful characters in their own right. (So, if you're an insanely powerful magic user such as the wizard Shazam, you might get off as easily as being turned to stone.) His unmasked face is typically depicted as a blinding light that doesn't let the reader see; the one time it is fully seen, however, it's a disgusting mass of tentacles and insectoid limbs. He also controls demons and can open portals to his master's home dimension, and has survived without aging since the silent film era.
  • Considering Grant Morrison loves these, their run on JLA (1997) featured two very prominent ones:
    • They used another member of Starro's species simply called "the Star Conqueror" during their 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 — 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 — to stop it. 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 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 its Kryptonite), it was still in danger of detonating and vaporizing half the galaxy. All while being far larger than the Earth.
• 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. At one point, Lucifer flies out to just in front of the Source mentioned below and ignores it. It's simply beneath his notice at the time.
  • The same series has the Jin-En-Mok and the Silk Man, survivors of the destruction of what's described as "an earlier, cruder Creation" and so very horrible in their own, special ways.
• The Gentry from The Multiversity are a group of evil entities that are roaming the multiverse and destroying every world they come across in really horrific ways. Just seeing them from another universe crippled Lord Havok and drove him mad. They're also powerful enough to trap Nix Uotan, the last Monitor, in the panels of the comic book he's appearing in and convert him into one of their own. On top of all that, it's implied that reading the series will let the Gentry into our universe.
  
  In the end, it's even worse. It turns out that the Gentry are from our universe, Earth-33. And they are all just servants to an even bigger threat, the Empty Hand, who has all of Earth-42 inhabitants (the Li'l League included) as his servants and spies. And even when the Gentry were beaten, Empty Hand just created new ones like it was nothing and the combined efforts of the entire Multiversity would most likely not be effective as Empty Hand is the personification of our growing real world apathy towards superheroes and comics. And Empty Hand is still digesting and gaining strength from the previous pre-Flashpoint multiverse. The best the Multiversity can do is establish a watch until they can come up with a way to take down Empty Hand and his Gentry... and the rest of Earth-33 if it comes to it...
• New Gods:
  • Darkseid is the Abstract Apotheosis of evil with access to such uncanny powers as the And I Must Scream-inducing Omega Effect or the Anti-Life Equation, and who rules over a borderline-Eldritch Location found outside of time and space. Canonically every Darkseid in the multiverse (And New God for that matter) is just a fraction of the true entity, which are implied to live infinite dimensions about us and to be the essence of what they represent. This means that Darkseid isn't just the God of Evil inside the comic, he is a fraction of our reality's platonic ideal of Evil!. Darkseid's eldritch status is played for all it's worth during Final Crisis; after his reincarnation into Dan Turpin, 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 (one parallel universe actually is destroyed by this)? He sits on his throne, waiting for reality to die MERELY BECAUSE HE EXISTS.
    • By proxy, this means that most of the New Gods are this too, even the friendly ones like Mr. Miracle, Big Barda, Orion or the Forever People.
    • Relating to Darkseid, the Omega Effect is an Eldritch Abomination in itself: It's an extradimensional force that can not only desintegrate almost anything (if you're as tough as Cyborg Superman maybe you will just barely die) and allow Darkseid to then recreate you as a zombie, but also has the Life Trap, which is manifested as a void with a vaguely human shape called the Omega Sanction that traps you infinitely in increasingly more dreadful lifes until you become a servant of Anti-Life. Shilo Norman, the greatest escape artist ever trained by the the New God of freedom, Scott Free, is so far the only thing to have escaped the Omega Sanction's full power.
  • The Anti-Life Equation is also an Eldritch Abomination: a (heavily implied to be sentient) abstract mathematical formula that scientifically determines the futility of life and can destroy free will. Some parts of it tend to crop up on Earth, particularly in its collective unconscious through characters like Sonny Sumo or Empress, the reason behind Darkseid's continuous attacks on Earth, despite multiple instances showing that not even Darkseid can either fully control or even comprehend Anti-Life, since it's tied directly to the Source, one of the few things Darkseid is powerless against. Pied Piper channeling the whole equation through The Power of Rock was enough to kill Desaad and destroy APOKOLIPS. Cosmic Odyssey shows the Anti-Life Equation as a shadowy Brown Note Being so powerful and evil that it forces Darkseid to work with his sworn enemies to stop it (although it was later retconned to be a different creature). The Death of the New Gods also features a similar concept, where Anti-Life is revealed to be one half of a cosmic being that was split into two by the war of the Old Gods, but this was also retconned later, although not 100% dropped.
  • The Source. Way out there, space becomes white, and after that, there is a MASSIVE, INFINITE MULTIDIMENSIONAL WALL of Eldritch Abominations / Body Horrors marking the final boundary between our multiverse 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. Over time, it has been made up of the bodies of would-be conquerors and curiosity seekers from all across the universe who seeked to cross it, most notably Darkseid's father Yuga Khan, one of the most feared beings in the history of the universe. This is the Source Wall, and it lies on the edge of the known universe, in the Promethean Galaxy. Beyond the wall lies what is known as the Source, a seemingly sentient endless pool of infinite cosmic energy that is the "source" of all that exists, including the Speed Force, the Quantum Field and the Emotional Spectrum, and has been heavily implied to be tied to the Presence itself. The Source Wall is theoretically passable, however, but all those who try have been inevitably trapped in it, save for a few, like Superman and Hal Jordan, who saw A Form You Are Comfortable With; The Flash, who forgot what he saw, and even nervously admitted he preferred it that way; The Spectre (Who himself is a Humanoid Abomination in service of the Presence and one of the most powerful beings in existence) who almost went mad from seeing it and Kyle Rayner, who somehow emerged unscathed with the Life Equation inside his head.
• The Question: The 2020 Black Label mini series The Question: The many deaths of Vic Sage introduces Holden Malick/the Thing of a Thousand Faces, heavily implied to be the Devil in disguise and the root of all evil (That is, until the ending muddies it all a bit) who has been in a centuries-old fight with the past lifes of Victor Sage, who is destined to kill him. Despite looking human, when we see its true face it's revealed to be a deformed jagged brown ghost-like creature who is scarily reminiscent of the true form of Darkseid and a man with a puntillistic grey face.
• Robin (1993): Tim stumbles across a thing in the Appalachian Mountains that is currently in the form of an apparently harmless, if odd, little girl who maintains human form by linking itself to a human, who is given regenerative powers and made mute and whose mind is radically altered by the link. If the link is broken "she" reverts into a mass of tentacles, eyes and mouths and starts killing and eating everyone around "her" until she forms a new link. "She" doesn't seem to notice being shot and while using a flamethrower on her seems to get her attention it doesn't appear to actually cause her any damage.
• The Sandman has the seven Endless, Anthropomorphic Personifications of platonic concepts that shapeshift into A Form You Are Comfortable With and are considered to be the second strongest beings in the DCU, only surpassed by Lucifer. They're wave functions, esential for reality functioning, and when Lucifer created his own universe, they cropped there too, since it's impossible for a universe to exist without them. Dream is a Reality Warper that rules the Dreaming, Delirium (Formerly Delight) is able to induce neverending madness at will, Despair lives in a mirrorhouse and stares at misery through the multiverse to Self-Harm to. Ironically enough, Death is by far the most nice and polite of all of them.
  • The Big Bad of The Sandman: Overture turns out to be a sentient star who went crazy and, using the powers of a Dream Vortex, became a Cosmic Flaw bent on tearing down reality itself with insanity. It prove such a dangerous being that the only way Dream of the Endless, one of the most powerful being of the universe, could defeat it was to more or less reboot reality since the beginning through collectively dreaming the same so that the star never went insane in the first place.
• Shade, the Changing Man: Wizor used to be a megalomaniacal scientist from the planet Meta who travelled with a defective Madness-Vest to Earth and absorbed a dark aspect of the Spirit of America and combined it with a warped and condensed version of American pop culture. This turned him into the American Scream, a Reality Warper who looks like a rotting pale cadaver dressed in Uncle Sam's clothes that infected various parts of America with "the madness", turning them into Eldritch Locations, with the objective of eventually controlling "what makes sense and what doesn't" and rule the USA. Further depictions of the character in The Spectre imply that the American Scream might be a separate, much stronger entity as old as the country itself, representing the dark side of the USA, and serving as the Shadow Archetype of Uncle Sam of the Freedom Fighters.
• Superman:
  • The 5th Dimensional Imps, of which 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 (like Bat-Mite) are permitted only to cause mischief. Sometimes hiccups occur, like the time Mxyzptlk made the well-intentioned mistake of giving his reality-reshaping powers to the Joker.
    • The Big Bad of Grant Morrison's run on Action Comics is Vyndktvx, a 5th Dimension Imp, like Mr. Mxyzptlk, only a psychotic mass murderer rather than a practical joker.
    • It's eventually revealed that there are even higher dimensions than this, each with their own imps. The higher the dimension, the stronger the imp, all the way up to the one and only tenth-dimensional imp, Ultimator. He looks like this◊.
    • Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? is set in an alternate possible future where Superman is getting ready to retire - up until all his enemies return, and all-out war between them and his friends (with Lois, Lana, and Jimmy taking up the Phlebotinum behind some of their one-shot powers from Silver Age stories). It's a brutal affair where people die and From Bad to Worse reigns supreme. Then he puts together the clues of what's really going on. It turns out: Myxy orchestrated all of this. As a superdimensional imp older than time, he is now bored with being mischievous; every so many millennia he reinvents himself. He was benevolent once, more recently a harmless trickster, but now? He 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-a-hat image - mocking the idea that a sorcerer from the fifth dimension would ''really'' look like that - 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.
  • Doomsday is an ancient Genetic Abomination, Living Weapon, and Walking Wasteland that can come back from the dead and adapt to everything that killed it, becoming stronger after each death. It sees any life form as a threat, so its main directive is to end all life, which it certainly seems capable of. It is most famous for managing to kill Superman in the famous storyline The Death of Superman, being the first and by far most famous villain to do so. At its most powerful it even managed to curb-stomp DARKSEID.
  • Viroxx, which could only be described a space-virus that devoured energy, capable of converting sentient beings into drones that in turn would absorb others as nourishment for their master. The assimilating process was supposedly irreversible and turns the victim into an unfeeling, cold-blooded monster interested only in killing more people to absorb their energy (one heartbreaking moment was when a scientist witnessed his recently converted wife devouring their daughter, and he ends up being forced to kill her in self-defense); It had laid waste to many worlds, destroying billions of lives and reducing entire populations into a few thousand vagrants based on space fleets. Even Superman himself is unable to hold it back and in the end, with the combined effort of all the survivors they only managed to scary it away — not kill it, but chase it far away from our galaxy.
  • The Phantom Zone: In Pre-Crisis continuity, there was an entity made of billions of dead souls from the earliest days of the universe. Calling itself Aethyr, or the Oversoul, it enclosed itself into a dimension outside the physical universe that it merged with its own mind and that it has absolute mastery of. Travel too far within it, and you risk your soul being destroyed and becoming part of Aethyr. At its outermost edge, representing Aethyr's capacity for abstract thought, is a realm where anyone within it can only exist as an incorporeal wraith: the Phantom Zone. And as of Escape from the Phantom Zone, Aethyr is BACK.
  • Lex's plan in The Black Ring is revealed to be to gain the powers of the Zone's Child, the embodiment of the Phantom Zone (And the post-crisis counterpart of the Aethyr), who holds enough power to turn Lex Luthor into an omnipotent Physical God capable of altering time and space at his will and grant everyone pure happiness and bliss with just a thought. Unfortunately, since Luthor is.... well, Luthor, upon learning he can only do good with these powers, and thus is prohibited from harming Superman, immediatly gives them up since for him there's no point in being God if he can't destroy Supes.
  • Solaris, the Solar Computer is a sentient artificial sun whose mere gravity threatened entire solar systems and later unleashed a cancer plague on Earth. His most famous feat though was poisoning the sun, which required Superman to sacrifice himself to fix it over the course of thousands of years.
  • Red Daughter of Krypton: Worldkiller-1 is an omnicidal, shape-shifting, sentient alien black goo which steals -and often consumes- bodies and is bonded with an indestructible armor suit. And it's nearly as strong and invulnerable as a Kryptonian. And it isn't vulnerable to Kryptonite.
  • In Supergirl story arc Bizarrogirl, the "Godship" is a moon-sized world-eating creature called "Ash'ka'phageous".
  • Supergirl's Greatest Challenge: A planetary explosion caused by a doomsday device turns a mad scientist and a laboratory animal into humongous masses of positive and negative energy. The former mad scientist -called Positive Man by the Legion of Super-Heroes for lack of a better name-, now looking like a translucent, white-outlined, vaguely-humanoid thing, hates life and roams the cosmos obliterating inhabited worlds by merely passing through them.
• Swamp Thing:
  • Swamp Thing himself is a subdued but very notable example: A massive creature made of mud and organic matter that serves as the elemental embodiment of the Green, an interdimensional mystical force that connects all plant life. As such, Swampy has total control of the vegetation on the universe, including being able to regenerate from nothing, creating new bodies, growing to enormous sizes or teleporting through entire galaxies merely by transfering his consciousness to vegetation light years away. Upon meeting him, Black Orchid straight up thought of him as God.
    • Hell, every Elemental Realm could be considered an Eldritch Abomination to some degree. They're billion year old mystic forces of almost endless power that expand through the multiverse and serve as the Anthropomorphic Personification of various elements, and often need an avatar as their servant to work properly. The Green is the representation of plant life, while the Red serves as one for animal life and is ruled by Mix-and-Match Critters Animalistic Abominations. The Grey represents fungal life, while the Divided represents bacteria, and both look even more like a Botanical Abomination than the Green. From here, they get a bit more abstract: The Clear, the White, the Melt and the Parliament of Flames represent water, air, earth and fire respectively (Red Tornado used to be a servant of the White, and Firestorm of the Parliament of Flames), while the Rithm is technology. Finally and most creepy of them all, the Rot/The Black represents death and decay, and have a tendency of creating hideous Undead Abominations that tend to overstep their rules and try to end all organic life.
  • Scott Snyder's run introduces 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 abovementioned The Hunters Three serve the same dark forces, ultimately revealed true in Rotworld.
  • The Original Darkness, the Big Bad of the "Murder of Crows" arc. For starters, this thing is the chaos that existed prior to the Presence beginning its creation. It's also brain-meltingly enormous; the telepath Mento actually starts foaming at the mouth trying to comprehend the scale of this thing. Just having your existence acknowledged by it can have fatal results for even powerful magic-users, as Zatara and Sargon found out the hard way. Oh, and it's absolutely unstoppable: Etrigan, Doctor Fate, and The Spectre all try and fail horribly to halt its assault on Heaven, with the Spectre memorably being curbstomped by the Darkness's thumb. It takes the Presence itself to intervene to stop this thing, and it couldn't destroy the Darkness, merely nullify it, as they are equals.
• Regular Teen Titans villain Trigon is an immortal gigantic demon from another dimension that has existed since the beginning of the universe as cosmic energy until the dimension of Azarath gave him a shape. He’s a Made of Evil entity with Reality Warper powers so massive that in his homeland of Azarath, he can even rival fellow abomination Mr. Mxyzptlk, and has enslaved and destroyed whole universes. Trigon is so powerful that he requires an avatar to manifest properly into our world (In this case, his daughter Raven, a borderline Humanoid Abomination herself).
• Watchmen: Doctor Manhattan, a gigantic blue Energy Being who exists outside of time as we know it, experiencing all points in his life simultaneously. He also has Complete Immortality and the ability to exist in multiple places at once. Silk Spectre I describes him as a sentient H-bomb. His existence has caused substantial changes in the Alternate History; among other things, he is single-handedly responsible for the US winning the Vietnam War in about a week. At the end, he leaves Earth to find another planet he can populate with life. It is revealed in Doomsday Clock that he ended up in the DC universe and is, among other things, responsible for the New 52 by simply editing DC's history out of pure, cynical curiosity. He ends re-editing it after being inspired by Superman (and realising how important he is to every iteration of the DC Universe as The Cape), creating the Rebirth era of the DC universe, and using the last of his power to create a Watchmen version of Superman.
  • Watchmen also features a human-made abomination in the form of the Psychic Squid, a deformed and slimy giant mollusk-like thing created using the brain of a psychic and deliberately designed to look as repulsive as possible. On the second of November, the squid is teleported on New York, killing three million in a psychic attack and giving nightmares to people from around the world. It's so horrifying that it ends the Cold War because the world governments believe it's the first of a series of attacks from interdimensional aliens.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Wonder Woman (1942): The beings from Pluto do not reflect light so look like shadow and eat emotions, by splitting their victims into the colored emotional spectrum which destroys their body on the physical plane and lets the plutoians take their time eating since their victims cannot die, but are not fully alive, in such a state.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): The Hekatonkheires (Hundred-Handed Ones), especially Cottus who mostly looks like a giant thing made of shadowy hands with a glowing interior and whose spine has been mistaken for stairs by even Wonder Woman herself.
  • Wonder Woman (2006): The khunds are being wiped out by an alien that is completely out of context for them and which slaughters billions of them easily while they are unable to harm it in return. When Wonder Woman gets a look at the situation she realizes that the khunds are being exterminated by Olympians when she sees ichor.
  • Wonder Woman (2011): This version of Poseidon is an enormous teal creature that looks vaguely like a combination of a few octopi, a whale, and some type of pinniped with growths atop his head that look like coral and a giant starfish. There's also a smaller version of himself inside him.