Eldritch Location / Comic Books

• The Bad Bad Place: The Castavette Estate; on top of being able to appear and disappear at will, it has the ability to ensnare its inhabitants in illusory dreamworlds, somehow has enough space to encompass the population of an entire town despite being only a four-story house, and sports a vast array of impossibly-deep tunnels beneath it...which look suspiciously like burrows. Also, Google Maps can't get a clear shot of it without dissolving into pixels.
• Batman has a history of these:
  • Arkham Asylum. The place gets destroyed regularly, yet somehow always magically comes back and it has a tendency to drive people completely batshit insane just by being there. When you remember these facts one kind of has to wonder why the city of Gotham thinks sending already insane supervillains there will make them better.
    • In at least one continuity the madness of the asylum and its inhabitants warped space and time.
  • Batman Eternal has established that Arkham is a fucking daycare center compared to the nightmares that lurk in the tunnel system beneath the facility. Deacon Blackfire and his cult have set up shop there, resulting in the tunnels being filled with stuff like moving corpses, glowing underwater lakes, monsters that may or may not be demons, and spinal fluid floating in the air. And then Blackfire begins his summoning ritual/attack on Gotham, a terrifying event that makes Arkham collapse in on itself and into the tunnels. It's so horrifying that the stoic and atheistic Batwing starts crying to God for help out of sheer, pants-shitting fear.
  • In Batman: The Black Mirror, Gordon is starting to think Gotham itself qualifies. Several other stories reinforce this such as Dark Knight, Dark City where Thomas Jefferson summoned the demon Barbatos in a Black Magic ritual with other occultists, and Gotham City was built on top of the temple.
  • Robin (1993): Stephen's woods may look like a normal forest if you squint but Tim notices quite quickly that there are species there that have no business co-existing and things aren't necessarily the right size. Then there's the fact that neither space nor time work properly there, allowing Stephen to use it to nearly teleport but anyone or thing that follows him in and loses track of him will be lost in the woods forever.
• The Para-Zone from Black Hammer is a bizarre parallel dimension located outside of time. It resembles a starry void full of oversized eyeballs and neurons, and it contains many portals leading to different points in time and space. Anyone who tries to enter the Para-Zone without protection will immediately die a gruesome death; Colonel Weird is the sole exception for reasons unknown, though he did not come through the experience unscathed and has become a Non-Linear Character with a permanent connection to the Zone.
• In Cardboard, the cardboard monsters dig up Marcus' house and create their own living cardboard world underground.
• In The DCU, Heaven, of all places.
  • The city of Vanity from the short-lived Aztek series was implied to be one of these. It was a Wretched Hive that was worse than Gotham, full of a strange psychic malaise that turned two Captain Patriotic heroes into Nineties Anti-Heroes. It was implied that the town founders were all mad and used principles of sacred geometry to make the city utterly bent.
  • The 90s Doom Patrol had a benign one in the form of Danny the Street. Luckily, he was a good guy.
  • Shade, the Changing Man: The Area of Madness and the larger Area it is part of appears anywhere from vaguely surreal to incomprehensibly psychedelic, filled with creatures hostile to life, limb, and/or sensibilities, and more could be generated simply by entering the Area. Shade can create more localized versions around himself, but his apartment in the crack in the sidewalk of Times Square was the largest and most stable.
  • Apokolips is a hellish fascistic world existing outside the multiverse resembling a mixture of both Hell and Nazi Germany. Its sun is actually the core of the planet, which produces it to be filled with pools of lava and pits of solar radiation that managed to corrupt Superman in Darkseid War. Oh, and its ruler is Darkseid, an Eldritch Abomination God of Evil Abstract Apotheosis Omnicidal Maniac and the overall Big Bad of the DCU as a whole. New Genesis also could qualify as an Eldritch Location since it also exists outside of time and space and is home of a race of Humanoid Abominations governed by Highfather, a God-like being, and has direct line with the Source, of which the Presence is just an aspect.
  • The Dreaming as it appears in The Sandman series qualifies since it explicitly disregards natural laws in favour of those crafted by Morpheus. In fact, each of the realms of the Endless (along with Hell) can be called an Eldritch Location by itself.
  • Wonder Woman: Olympus tends to be full of Bizarrchitecture made up of Alien Geometries with gravity behaving very oddly and the whole place reflecting the personality, mentality and will of the current ruler. If one manages to fall from Olympus they'll land in Hades, which will not only be a far enough fall to kill them but will ensure that their afterlife is sealed to Hades reguardless of what their soul would have done otherwise.
• In the first Figment comic book series in Disney Kingdoms, the Nightmare Nation is this. It seems to be the anthropomorphic personification of despair, depression, and art block.
• Immortal Iron Fist: The Eighth City was a brutally hellish realm that could only be reached through a dimensional gateway located in the remotest part of China. At first it was an empty place until the elders of K'un-L'un turned it into a prison for many demons and monsters that plagued the Seven Capital Cities of Heaven. It's an absolutely dreadful place populated by all evils in the world, where none of its inhabitants are able to age, and they are eventually driven mad by their prolonged stay.
• Marvel/DC Crisis Crossover JLA/Avengers justifies the Conflict Ball by saying each team's universe is this to the other. Some fundamental characteristic of the neighboring reality makes the vistors increasingly discomforted, as everything feels subtly "wrong" (such as Marvel's sun producing sunlight that Superman finds "greasy"), which wears on their nerves until they start snapping at their counterparts.
• Johnny the Homicidal Maniac:
  • Johnny's house. It's implied the house grew its own Torture Cellar, and that the place is gradually expanding in order to take on more victims as Johnny grows increasingly insane and murderous. The Wall Johnny has to 'feed' also moves around the house, starting out at ground level and eventually finding its way down into the cellars.
  • To a lesser degree, the entire city (seemingly the setting for all of Jhonen Vasquez's works) might qualify, being home to a variety of horrible creatures, a variety of horrible people, and very little sanity. It helps that the whole place is hellish red/pink and is populated by, among others, alien invaders, the Antichrist, and the aforementioned homicidal maniac, along with an apocalyptic Eldritch Abomination, a plague of The Corruption, Satan, and Jhonen Vasquez himself. It's notable that the city doesn't appear to have limits either, and none of the aforementioned works ever leave it; even when Johnny goes on the run, Devi tries to hide from Johnny, and Zim wanders the streets aimlessly for god-knows-how-long, nobody ever gets out or even seems to think of leaving.
• Locke & Key: The caves beneath the Keyhouse are implied to be somehow otherworldly, as the Black Door (which opens to a dimension of Eldritch Abominations) is revealed via flashbacks to colonial times to have simply appeared there on its own, slowly forming out of a drawing on the wall the more that people paid attention to it.
• Al Ewing's run on Mighty Avengers introduces the Neutral Zone, a chaotic place on the edge of all known existance, where the typical laws of physics don't exist, and so hostile no living thing can exist there for more than a few minutes, even with the best protection science can provide. The Ultimates (2015) expands on it a bit further, showing it's right on the edge of the omniverse, and home to Eldritch Abominations and "predatory concepts".
• The House of Shadows, in the 2022 run of Moon Knight, is a Sapient House from another dimension that interacts with the earthly realm by possessing a building. It can freely move around the world by shifting its anchor-house, and has complete mastery over its interior. It can create rooms and furnishings as needed, expand the spatial dimensions of any individual chamber as it desires, and telekinetically rearrange its contents. When it wants to fight, it can create mind-warping non-Eucledian geometery, or simply sprout tentacles, claws and mouths from every surface to rend, tear and maul.
• Star Wars: The High Republic - Eye of the Storm: The homeworld of the Nameless is a planet protected by a layer of storm clouds, the surface of which has weird colors which give the planet an ethereal look. It also seems to be sentient according to Marchion Ro, with it seemingly trying to kill him and his followers as soon as they enter the atmosphere and the local fauna (other than the Nameless, who are a completely different beast in their own right) gang up on them.
  Marchion Ro: This world is alive. Every part of it. From stones to skies. Be wary. As I said — it will defend itself.
• Superman:
  • In Reign of Doomsday, the Superman Family is locked away in a pocket dimension (together with a pack of Doomsday clones), bigger than the spaceship where it is stored in, featuring an endless maze of tunnels and shafts which literally go on forever and still turn back on themselves. Also, time flows differently in each area. Supergirl tosses one Doomsday clone into one shaft, and the monster spends years trapped inside. When he emerges out of the shaft, it has been minutes from the Supers' perspective. Also, the place has no door or exit anywhere.
  • The Phantom Zone: Superman and Quex-Ul cross through several dimensions created and fully controlled by the ancient, reality-warping and utterly alien mind of the Aethyr. So, a sun glowing in the sky leads them to the stairs of a temple. There, they are greeted by priestesses whose heads turn into reflections of Superman and Quex-Ul's worst traumas before exploding. Both Kryptonians are thrown into a whirlpool and tossed in front of the gates of a castle surrounded by clouds...
• In the Marvel Universe, The Thanos Imperative introduced an entire freaking parallel universe as an Eldritch Location. It all began when somehow, somebody killed death and allowed Life to grow unrestrained. Now the entire universe is under the influence of Elder Gods and, using the Fault that has opened up in the MU, they are now intent on corrupting the rest of reality.
  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 Dead Universe that appears across stories in The Transformers (IDW) exists as an alternate reality that seeks to spread into the regular universe. Although its true nature is not clearly known, it has been confirmed to be sentient. Biomechanical beings that enter return as a regenerating zombie that can only survive in the normal universe for limited periods of time. Said zombies kill any living being they directly touch. It's later revealed that it's a universe where all life was extinguished during its moment of conception; basically a zombified universe.
• Transformers: More than Meets the Eye features quite a few:
  • The crashed Decepticon warship the Scavengers encounter in issue 7. First of all, its weirdly designed gravity engines cause the interior of the ship to always be right side up no matter what position the ship is in (if it was upside down and you stepped onto its ceiling, you would fall upwards into the floor). And that's not getting into the menagerie of logic-defying horrors inside it; a room with brains hanging from the ceiling, vats of aborted and mutated Transformer fetuses, a wooden robot that displays signs of sentience, and a hallway made of bleeding skin. The only surviving passenger, Grimlock, was given irreparable brain damage and amnesia by either the ship itself or its crew, leaving him unable to recall or describe his time on it. In general it gives off a sense of foreboding dread the whole time the Scavengers are near it and Misfire starts demanding to leave after only about an hour of exploring.
  • The world on the other side of Tyrest's Titan space bridge. When Skids enters it, he finds a massive and bizarrely built city lurking in the distance, four massive and multicolored moons floating above the city, and a floating rainbow-colored Eldritch Abomination that looks like a ball of energy and can only speak through sensations. Disturbingly, it's strongly implied that this location is Cyberutopia, which is basically the Transformer equivalent of heaven.
  • The quantum duplicate Lost Light. A destroyed ship created through a spatial paradox, its experimental quantum engines have been damaged, resulting in it constantly creating quantum foam that wears down space itself. The real Lost Light is nearly wiped from existence just by coincidentally floating by the thing.
  • The Lost Light. Nobody knows where the ship even came from (not even its original owners, who found it floating emptily in space), its quantum engines are noted to be unlike any ever seen, there was a Sparkeater locked up in its engine rooms, several people comment that it feels strange and oddly familiar, its old owners were devil-worshippers who seemingly performed strange rituals in it, and there's a secret basement, which warps your perception of time while you're in it and contains a murderous psychopath. And its crew always seems to be made up almost entirely of dysfunctional and mentally ill people. It's later revealed that the ship's very existence was brought about screwing around with space time.
• In the Uncle Scrooge comic "Scrooge in No-Land", Scrooge and Rockerduck are transported to the titular No-Land (or it was a dream, the ending is vague). It's a constantly mist-shrouded ocean where the only signs of civilization are warning bells made from jangling coins and a cruise ship. The ship's cafeteria is filled with delicious food despite no one being around to cook it, and the cargo hold is filled with gold coins that constantly replace themselves when removed. Beyond the ship float giant icebergs made of gold, and a sperm whale made of pure diamond swims nearby. The only denizen and Dimension Lord is Captain Gold, a man made of pure gold, who wishes to offer Scrooge and Rockerduck the opportunity to join him, but doing so will turn them into gold. They turn him down.
• Trese: The intersection of Balete Drive and 13th Street in Quezon City, the setting of the very first story in the collection (an encounter with a ghostly woman in an Ethereal White Dress), might actually be a (very mild) one: observant readers have pointed out that in reality the two streets do not cross. (On the other hand, it is also possible the creators simply used a fictionalised map of the city.)
• In Zombies en la Moneda, the Chilean presidential palace, known as La Moneda, has become a heinous place where zombies and humanoid abominations roam, the walls are made of living flesh, there are living people merged with those walls, and the whole place works by feeding on the vital energy of celebrities and politicians.

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