Examples of Cosmic Horror Story in Comic Books:
DC Comics
- Aquaman: Andromeda's drive is something awakening undersea and putting lives, and the world, at risk through its reality-warping powers.
- Both Marvel and DC are this to some extent, especially with the Brothers. Crisis Crossover events usually involve cosmic threats great enough to leave the world, if not the entire universe, fundamentally changed afterwards.
- The Dark Multiverse from DC takes the cake. It's an unstable set of realities which shouldn't exist but do, where evil wins no matter what, heroes die or become evil, and life is futile. Though with Duke Thomas winning that may not be so...
Marvel Comics
- Both Marvel and DC are this to some extent, especially with the Brothers. Crisis Crossover events usually involve cosmic threats great enough to leave the world, if not the entire universe, fundamentally changed afterwards.
- Immortal Hulk does this with gamma radiation, and therefore the entire Hulk mythos. In the second issue, when Del Frye was injected with a gamma-irradiated serum, he saw a "green door" that was "below everything" before dying. The next issue, Lew Lembert also mentions a "green door" but this time with what's beyond it: the One Below All. According to Brian Banner in issue 12, his research into gamma energy hypothesized a third form that energy takes when it's neither a wave or a particle, but when he had a nightmare of the Green Door and the One Below All he denounced it out of fear. Issue #25 is an entire issue of the concept: the last survivors of a dead universe, faced with an unstoppable monstrosity they cannot comprehend.
- The Avengers (Jonathan Hickman) is this applied to an entire superhero multiverse; as its main Arc Words put it: "Everything Dies". A number of foundational Marvel heroes, including Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic, and Black Panther, are forced to judge whether to kill other Earths to temporarily save their own as The Multiverse is suddenly locked into an inescapable death spiral. One of them does. On the other side, the optimism of the likes of Captain America and the Great Society (a Captain Ersatz Justice League of America from a parallel universe) is ultimately exposed as meaningless and ineffective against the end of everything. Oh, and also the beings in charge of running the Multiverse want to kill the Earth and any worlds in their way of doing that, and even they're on their last legs because they've been attacked by an unimaginable force far bigger and more powerful than themselves. By the end of the run it's revealed all of this is the result of cosmic beings known as the Beyonders living outside reality, who consider themselves Above Good and Evil. Everything has just been them conducting a callous experiment on the results of the destruction of all creation, and they've already slaughtered every high-tier cosmic being that might have been tasked with stopping them, with the few heroes that manage to confront them such as Thor and Hyperion being destroyed effortlessly. The run concludes with Captain America and Iron Man, the leaders of Earth's Greatest Heroes, dying fighting each other out of spite over mutual betrayals as the universe explodes around them, and there was nothing anyone ever could have done to stop it. The followup Secret Wars (2015) has the final two universes die and the last plans by the Fantastic Four and allies to save even just a few people fail. The only reason anything survives at all is because DOCTOR DOOM, ultimate villain of the Marvel Universe and the only one ruthless enough to truly do whatever it takes to defy the Beyonders, initiated the destruction of countless universes himself, including many of those the heroes dealt with that morally shattered them. He seized enough power in the wake of this to forge their remains into a new planet so brutal its inhabitants refer to it as Battleworld, which he rules over as its tyrannical and unopposable god-king. And after all this, it's clear to Doom that even this last outpost of any kind of known reality is broken, as a reflection of his own blighted soul. However, a few heroes and villains survive from the old multiverse to fight back against Doom, and the fate of the Beyonders is as yet unknown. Given this will end with the Marvel Multiverse restored for All-New All-Different Marvel, the whole saga retroactively becomes Lovecraft Lite, albeit running as hard as it can to the cynical end of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism until the last minute.
- Sub-Mariner: The Depths is a psychological horror story where Namor the Sub-Mariner himself is the horror, terrorizing the crew, visiting their dreams, and killing them to keep the secret of Atlantis safe.
- The Thanos Imperative was a storyline where the main Marvel Universe was invaded by the Cancerverse, a version of the Marvel universe where every living thing in the universe was made immortal by Eldritch Abominations (and turned into hideous tentacle-beard monsters in the process) and got too full of its own version of life and started to invade other universes to spread.
Creator-owned
- The notorious works of indie comics artists Al Columbia and Hans Rickheit and, at times, Edward Gorey.
- James Tynion IV's Memetic. The long and short of it is a meme of a sloth induces madness in people within twelve hours of seeing it, culminating in the human race fusing together into skyscraper-tall towers just in time to greet an incoming armada of Eldritch Abominations. It's implied that this was the reason for humans existing all along.
- Nameless (2015) by Grant Morrison is about an occult hustler with morals (or lack thereof) not unlike John Constantine's who's hired by a group of billionaires to save the world from Xibalba, a massive asteroid on a collision course with Earth... Only there's something far, far worse than the asteroid inside it.
- A possible interpretation of Warren Ellis' Supergod, with the twist that humanity is ultimately responsible for the very creation of the incomprehensible god-things whose very existence renders it insignificant.
- The Unfunnies features a world of Hanna-Barbera style cartoon characters whose world, where a pie in the face was the worst crime, is corrupted into a horrific place of murder and abuse towards adults and children alike. A cop investigates and discovers they are being victimized by their monstrous creator, who wields godlike invincibility and successfully switches places with one of the characters to escape death row.
- Grant Morrison's Zenith mainly fought the Lloigor, shapeless body-stealing beings from beyond time and space who can consume reality. Turns out they're actually the first-generation superheroes who "self-evolved" into reality-warping Gods and subsequently went mad with power but were forced to live outside normal space-time since their own universe was too fragile to hold them. And they want back in. Badly.
Other publishers
- A Donald Duck comic, The Call of C'Russo, of all things, features this as its story. Donald tries out for a singing competition organized by a renowned musician, and gets successfully recruited by having his voice altered by an apparent twin of this musician. It's later revealed that the entire world is actually the dream of Ar-Finn, a primordial cephalophoid monster which slumbers in the ancient city of Sp'too at the bottom of the sea. The two twins are manifestations of the monster's conflicting subconscious desires to either continue sleeping or wake up (which Donald's voice will make it do). When the creature does exactly that, the rest of the world vanishes as it no longer creates the world-dream, and everything in its vicinity shapes itself into its image, resulting in Donald and his nephews growing tentacles and stick eyes. It's eventually put back to sleep, but the story ends on a rather dark note as Donald contemplates everybody's existence as mere parts of the creature's imagination.
- El Eternauta. The aliens called "Hands", who are smarter and more evolved than human beings, are actually unwilling puppets of higher entities that they only dare to call "Them", and they even define "Them" as the "cosmic hate". "Them" are never shown.
- Fall of Cthulhu by Boom! Studios. Their other lovecraftian series Cthulhu Tales however, being an Anthology Comic, had a lot of individual stories fall into Lovecraft Lite instead.
- The Filth, from Grant Morrison, arguably. But Secret Original is living in this: A Captain Ersatz of Golden Age Superman, he discovered his world had no free will and went to change this, by coming into reality. And the reality is: He is just a comic book character...
- There was an Anthology Comic series from Vertigo called Flinch. In one story, a massive fan of Lovecraft eventually grows up with the realization "We don't deserve monsters" and loses all wonder of creatures out there.
- It's still uncertain whether Hellboy and B.P.R.D. are this or Lovecraft Lite. It appeared at first to be the latter, but the monsters are getting nastier, and Hellboy is getting increasingly desperate.
- Leviathan, shown in Hellbound: Hellraiser II, was described in supplementary graphic novels to be the true Eldritch Abomination. The Cenobites, who function as its foot soldiers, were at least human once. Leviathan appears as nothing more than a floating geometric figure with Blue-and-Orange Morality.
- Alan Moore has dipped several times in Cthulhu Mythos territory, usually with one or several twists on the typical elements; most notably in Yuggoth Creatures and The Courtyard/Neonomicon and its prequel/sequel, Providence. In all three, things end as well as you would expect.
- The Sandman (1989) stories focus on abstract beings of incomprehensible power and age that govern the whole of reality, and where supernovae exploding and wiping out solar systems of intelligent life are so common that they only mention them in passing.
- An example of a more Mind Screwingly surreal Cosmic Horror Story is A Tale of Two Cities, which is told in the manner of a Lovecraftian ghost story and has a man become lost in a city's dream (i.e. cities have a sort of collective personality shaped by their inhabitants, and if they have a personality, why can't they dream? In Sandman, this sort of logic applies to many of the anthropomorphic personifications and their realms) and meets a man who has been lost there for countless years, but still prefers the possibility of wandering through the city's dream to the alternative: "That the city should wake. That it should wake and—" but he gets distracted before he can tell us what might happen if a dreaming city woke up.
- In A Dream of a Thousand Cats it is shown that if enough people dream the same thing at once (and it's not a large number, only a thousand or so) they can not only directly change the physical world, they can change history so that the world has always been in its "new" form, and the "old" world not only ceases to exist, but is Ret Goned from the entirety of history so that it never existed at all.
- That the Dreaming is a place inhabited by sentient creatures makes the end of A Game of You where Dream uncreates the skerry (a land that is apparently as vast and heavily populated as a country) a true Biblical apocalypse for its inhabitants. He quite casually confirms that he could recreate the land and resurrect the inhabitants exactly as they were before if he chose to, adding an almost Religious Horror to it, as it shows just how powerful he is, and how insignificant sentient beings are in comparison.
- A story where Haroun-al Rashid makes a bargain with Dream to preserve his perfect, magical city from the inevitable ravages of time by giving the entire city to Dream to take into his realm and preserve it forever in his stories. The story is relatively Lighter and Softer compared to some of the others (which tells you quite a lot about them!), but it still involves a real city being effortlessly transformed into a fantasy by the protagonist of the series.
- At the same time, one of these abstract beings (Morpheus himself) claims that he and his siblings are merely the servants, the dolls, of mortals. For better or for worse, mortals are the dominant power in creation.
- Spawn combines this with Religious Horror (and virtually every other horror subgenre): Humans are just pawns to a war between Heaven and Hell. It's mere chance, not the way you lived your life, that determine if you will go to one or the other. Also, going to Heaven isn't exactly a good thing because God and Satan Are Both Jerks; while there is a benevolent entity that is even more powerful than both of them combined, she's too busy taking care of the whole Multiverse to pay attention to the comics' main setting. Also, the Spawn franchise as a whole deals a lot with Fatalism (a heavy element of Lovecraftian stories) and the idea that fighting Evil is pointless.
