Seeing is believing.
- American Vampire contains some examples such as Dracula (depicted as a humanoid being seemingly made out of shadows that can drive people insane with his presence) and the Japanese vampires (xenomorph-looking aberrations that can infect humans in a matter of minutes), but the biggest one in the series is The Gray Trader. Think the Slenderman in a world where several vampire breeds and bloodlines exist, and he is the most fearsome thing around. He is no vampire, but actually a human who became the champion and protector of an Eldritch Abomination.
- The Hanged Man in Astro City is a spectral presence who (normally) operates out of the Shadow Hill district. It is a silent, foreboding black silhouette, who has its own agenda, but can usually be seen when supernatural dangers threaten its neighborhood.
- Polaroid from The Backstagers, one of the Backstagers of '87 who has claimed dominion over the Arch-Theater. It's not the actual Polaroid, it's a drawing Elliot Rample made in his notebook after finding the real Polaroid dead in the tunnels.
- Mad Jim Jaspers of the Captain Britain storyline "A Crooked World" crosses into this realm thanks to his abilities being strong enough to make him nigh-omnipotent, to the point that he may actually exist on a metaphysical level as well. He was so hideously powerful that his entire continuity had to be destroyed to prevent it from becoming infectious and warping reality in other continuities.
- Nimble Jack from the Dark Horse comic Colder looks like a rail-thin, grinning, wide-eyed man missing a front tooth who's always shoeless, but he's actually an entity from a dark reflection of reality called "the Hungry World" who feeds on insanity, delights in driving to suicide vulnerable people to feed just before/at the moment of death, and has many freaky powers and abilities, such as inhuman agility and flexibility, being usually Invisible to Normals, and the ability to hide almost anywhere (like inside his own reflection in a rearview mirror, or in the digestive tract of a random hobo), and popping out in the most disturbing ways possible (the hobo doesn't survive). And pretty much everything he says concerns him feeding — humans are just walking, talking menu items to him. Also, several other monstrous "things" from the Hungry World either obey him or fear him enough that they'll leave alone someone identified as one of his prospective meals, including some very BIG ones.
- The Department of Truth:
- One of the tell-tale signs that Black Hat is involved with something is a woman dressed all in red who wears black sunglasses. She has large X's instead of eyes, and anyone who looks at her is overcome with an escalating sense of dread.
- The Star-Faced Man is a Tulpa manifestation of the Satanic Panic of the 70's and 80's, later reemerging with the rise of Pizza-Gate and QAnon. He appears in the nightmares of children as an inhuman entity with a pentagram over his face eating a baby, and his presence is nothing short of traumatizing for his victims. It was him who inspired Cole Turner to become a government investigator, having encountered him in his youth, and it's when he's offered to hunt down the Star-Faced Man does he agree to join the Department.
- Several of the enemies of Doctor Strange, the most notable ones being Dread Dormammu, who looks like a humanoid with a constantly burning head, and his sister, Umar the Unrelenting, who looks like a beautiful human woman. They are actually Faltine, a race of pure energy beings, and have the power to rival Abstracts. Umar's daughter, Clea, is half-Faltine, yet looks like a human woman, only with unusually white hair. Strange also faces various gods, like Cthon (who looks like a hideous old man) and Demon Lords and Archdevils, like Mephisto (who looks like a human with unnaturally red skin).
- Fantomah, Woman of the Jungle, created by Fletcher Hanks, who also created Stardust below, is an apparent blonde Caucasian Jungle Princess who, however, shares Stardust's Reality Warping powers and sadism. Unlike him she is explicitly described as a magic-user, and her face turns into a skull whenever she uses her powers, making her seem even more inhuman and her qualification for this trope more intentional.
- Fall of Cthulhu and Hexed introduces a new player to the Cthulhu Mythos; the Harlot, Keeper of Secrets, which obviously means Keeper of Forbidden Knowledge in this setting. She has a giant green head which houses a nose too flat and a pair of large juicy red lips on top of a physique like a famine victim, and acts like an old-time burlesque madame. All "men's secrets" are hers which means she knows nearly every secret in reality, and demands prices from those who barter with her for her knowledge, anything from precious memories to one's youth to your very sanity. Fall has the Harlot scheming with and against the wicked Nyarlathotep and gives the protagonist Cy Morgan the knowledge of the one thing that can vanish Nyarlathotep—the invocation of his true name—and waits until the crucial moment of Nyaralthotep's victory to reveal this, utterly derailing the Crawling Chaos' sprawling plan and sending him screaming back to Azathoth.
- What's worse is that the Keeper of Secrets is a Position of Literal Power; the Harlot had a predecessor, the Weaver, and Fall sees her choose a successor who in Hexed becomes the Thief. She also looks like a corpse and gets torn to pieces a few times without any visible discomfort.
- The final piece is that the Keeper of Secrets, as a part of the position, can never know the secret closest to their hearts despite their well of information. The fate of a loved one, how to fix a mistake, every new secret learning a mockery of their desire.
- The Flash: After the introduction of the Speed Force, many speedsters seem to be some level of this, as while they're still human in appearance and behavior, it's also now clear that they only act like it because they think they should. Speed Force conduits self-actualize, so a speedster is about as human as they think they are. If they think they have a limit or need to do something humans do, they will, but once they understand where their power comes from, they can basically live forever off of the Speed Force, never eating, never breathing, never sleeping, not needing anything else, while they run faster than sound. Fortunately, The Flash and their Legacy Character incarnations are all Nice Guy types who enjoy eating, sleeping, and being human, as if they do embrace their speed fully and run faster than light, they risk running into the Speed Force and joining with it completely.
- Wally West has demonstrated a few times just how close Speedsters come close to this. In the past, he's briefly turned into an Energy Being, and seems capable of doing this again but at great risk of losing his humanity, and it's shown that in the future, he'll eventually stop existing in a single location, choosing to use his speed to functionally be everywhere at once. One story even showed that his ultimate death will be after converting into an energy being fully, dying fighting for humanity after having long since abandoned it.
- The scary side of this is seen with the Reverse-Flashes, especially The Rival/Edward Clarris, Professor Zoom/Eobard Thawne, and Zoom/Hunter Zolomon. Edward Clarris was long lost in the Speed Force and, upon finally returning to the regular world, he was partially an Energy Being that was able to possess the body of Max Mercury, and brutally murdered many people to send a message to his rival Flash, Jay Garrick. Eobard Thawne died in the 80s but has repeatedly came back due to the fact he's now functionally a living paradox, with a Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory that allows him to repeatedly meddle with time and update his memories with those of any time-travelling version of himself. Hunter Zolomon is unique as he's not connected to the Speed Force, but became a Time Master after an accident went wrong, causing him to be able to manipulate his own personal timeline to make himself automatically faster than anything else; his presence however causes rips in time itself, and though he lacks the Required Secondary Powers of the other speedsters (in fact, when he became Zoom, he was in constant pain in large part because the air friction was burning his skin from moving so fast), he's still capable of other strange abilities.
- The Black Flash is the best case of this, as what it is exactly isn't entirely known. It's believed by Max Mercury to be the Grim Reaper itself personified for Speedsters, and appears to be a ravenous skeletal zombie wearing a crudely fit black version of the Flash's uniform. It moves at super-speed but in a more animalistic and off manner, makes time freeze around it, can travel as lightning, and it senses speedsters, whom it hunts down to drain them into dust. Also? Speedsters can be transformed into it, as happens to Barry Allen briefly; in fact, given that the black suit best resembled his and how he appeared when he died during COIE, it was probably his reanimated corpse this whole time. To beat it, Wally raced it to the end of time where death no longer had any meaning, at which point it faded.
- Galactus looks like a big man with a hat. In reality, he's a Cosmic Entity that devours entire worlds, created when the will of the previous universe — the one that collapsed into the matter that went 'boom' and made this universe in the Big Bang — merged with its last survivor. He only looks human because it's how people see him; no two races see him the same way. And he drains planets to sustain himself because his energy goes to keeping something a million times worse than himself sealed in its can, but more on Abraxas later.
- His brethren: while they look humanoid, they're embodiments of the most fundamental forces of reality and most of them look pretty strange. Eternity looks like a robed man version of the entire universe, Infinity is a female figure with yellow-black skin and lines across her body and while Oblivion may look relatively normal he's the Cosmic Entity in charge of that which has been wiped out of existence. Thankfully, they almost never interfere.
- Abraxas looks like a human with green skin who wears a toga, and he makes Galactus seem positively cuddly in comparison. Indeed, one of the reasons Galactus even exists is to keep Abraxas in check. Abraxas is the opposite of Eternity, making Abraxas the ultimate embodiment of unfettered destruction in the Marvel multiverse. Abraxas is fully willing and capable of killing entire universes, and the only way to get rid of him other than by reviving Galactus is to destroy all reality.
- The Incredible Hulk:
- The Green Scar personality has essentially gradually turned into one, both in terms of raw power, destructive nature, and turning even more powerful from both dark magic and nuclear explosions, as a force of pure destruction merging forces of both science and mysticism, and becomes more openly so after picking up one of the hammers of "The Worthy". This is especially true when he goes full on "Worldbreaker". For example, he went Worldbreaker in the Dark Dimension and reduced most of the realm into floating rubble.
- All forms of the Hulk are essentially this, but Immortal Hulk takes it to a whole new level, as he is now powerful enough to lay out The Mighty Thor with a single punch, and has Resurrective Immortality capabilities the likes of which no other Hulk had displayed before.
- Then there's the potential future Hulk who's become powerful enough to devour the will of the universe so he could take up Galactus's role for the next universe as the Breaker of Worlds, and being a vessel for the One-Below-All, sets about that universe's annihilation.
- The Invisibles is full of this:
- Quimper used to be a ciuatete/tepicoton who accidentally fell on Earth from its dream-like dimension and was forced to witness the beating and rape of a young Lord Fanny. This corrupted him into Quimper, a deformed goblin pimp who can infect bad memories with a Mind Virus and make them overpower whoever infected into surrendering to Quimper's control to end the pain of the trauma.
- The Harlequinnade are a group of androgynous people who reside in a glass dimension with toilets and who somehow know how to operate the Hand of Glory. The final arc heavily implies its them who control the Invisibles, and that they're just a facet of a higher entity composed also of The King in Yellow and Satan.
- The members of the Outer Church willingly surrender their bodies to the Archons so they can fuse their body with Archon technology to make them able to withstand the Archons' Brown Note presence. Although from the outside they look human, they have access to weird uncanny abilities, such as cancer-preventing nanites that can be transmited through breast-feeding or 4D armour that looks like a symbiote with a lamprey mouth.
- Orlando is a particularly nasty one in that its human sadism outweighs its supernatural powers. It initially looks like just a derranged Serial Killer who wears their victim's skin as a mask, but it is revealed to actually be a demon from Mictlan with a true form looks like a smoke and fire spirit and who is powerful enough to have stolen Xipa Totec's name.
- John Lennon seems to have become a psychaedelic God of counterculture and something of a saint among the Invisibles. In his first appearence he looks like a floating head that turns the entire room into an LSD trip and shows signs of being omnipotent.
- Judge Dredd: The Sisters of Death, Phobia and Nausea, are two witches responsible for the creation of the Dark Judges. While they used to look human, their real form is some sort of extradimensional abomination that feeds off of life itself. During their chronologically later appearances (such as "Necropolis"), they don't even bother with the disguise and simply appear as evil spirits.
- Lady Death. In her original incarnation, she was a normal human who became the ruler of Hell after absorbing all of the Devil's power. In the Avatar Press publications, she gradually grew into this trope with her background being widely changed — she is an "albino", an individual who made a Deal with the Devil to travel to the Labyrinth and gain god-like arcane powers, but they were regarded as abominations by the Labyrinth residents, due to albinos ending up on that domain willingly unlike other people and using its powers for evil. Later in the storyline, Lady Death would visit the Void and turn into its anthropomorphic personification, gaining all of its power in the process.
- The Antichrist from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, who is explicitly revealed to be Harry Potter, having gone insane after he discovered that his whole life was an elaborate ruse, is revealed as a massive, bald human with multiple eyes growing on his head like boils. He is doped up on anti-psychotics and manages to utterly vaporize Allan Quatermain by whipping out his penis and shooting a bolt of lightning out from it. The only way they were able to defeat him was by having Prospero ask God for help, who appeared in the form of Mary Poppins and unceremoniously smote him.
- The Jin En Mok of Lucifer look like humans, but that's just because they eat them — they take the form of the last person they devour. Their true forms are never seen, but when they want to fight, they gain pure white eyes, razor-sharp teeth, and prehensile intestines that they can use as a means of attack. It's said that they're beings left over from a previous version of the universe who want out of this one.
- Robin (1993): Tim comes across what appears to be a strange little girl, who is only maintaining that form by linking herself to a human boy who is left mute and whose mind is drastically altered by the connection. When the link is broken, she reverts into a writhing mass of tentacles, eyes and mouths and kills and eats everyone around her until forming a new link with an unsuspecting human who was trying to fight her, shapeshifting into a new human looking form and leaving the scene with her new human pet.
- Jimmy "Hybrid" Marks, originally of Rom: Spaceknight, who later migrated to the general Marvel Comics universe. A Half-Human Hybrid of human and Dire Wraith, Hybrid is a sadistic, inhuman beast that even his alien sorcerer tutors grew to fear. His "true" form is a slimy, fetid-smelling, hulking abomination that looks like a cross between a Gray alien and a ghoul, and his Superpower Lottery has imbued him with a grasp of Black Magic and Mind over Matter powers so potent he is practically immortal — every appearance he has made ends with him being torn apart into scattered molecules, only for Hybrid to reconstitute his atoms through sheer willpower, returning to bedevil the world once more.
- The Endless from The Sandman are seven entities older and more powerful than gods who generally shift into A Form You Are Comfortable With when around humans or other entities. Their parents Time and Night, introduced in The Sandman: Overture, also fit the bill.
- The Shade looks and acts human enough (though some artists do portray him with a certain pallor), but his powers are taken straight from the fabric of a dimension holding a godlike Eldritch Abomination and have essentially become one with him, making him ageless, virtually unkillable, and terrifyingly powerful. Thankfully for us, he's generally a fairly nice guy (not a hero by any means, but definitely not an outright villain either) and is perfectly willing to leave you be... that is, unless you attempt to attack Opal City. In the New 52, the Shade was selected to receive his powers by the Celtic goddess Scathach for reasons he doesn't divulge, but still remains ageless, nigh-unkillable, and astonishingly powerful. In addition, he doesn't even have blood anymore, just a sort of black liquid "shadowstuff" that fills his veins. And he can't even be killed, his body will just be sent back to the same realm his powers come from until he gains enough strength to reconstitute himself.
- Stardust the Super Wizard is an unintentional one. Imagine a character with the reality-warping power of Dr. Manhattan as mentioned below combined with the black and white worldview and the "creative" mind of his "colleague" Rorschach and you have Stardust.
- Superman:
- What Ever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow reveals that Mr. Mxyzptlk really looks like this; looking at him hurts due to his Alien Geometries. He chooses to present himself as he does purely for his own amusement.
- In War World Superman runs into The Spectre while he seeks his cousin Supergirl out. The Spectre is humanoid, but he is the embodiment of God's Wrath and unimaginably powerful.
- Supergirl's Greatest Challenge: A planetary explosion caused by a doomsday device turned a mad scientist into a humongous energy being who hates life and roams the cosmos obliterating inhabited worlds by merely passing through them. Despite its body being a white-outlined, translucent and intangible mass of positive ions -which led the Legion of Super-Heroes to call it Positive Man-, it still looks like a giant, four-limbed, bipedal humanoid.
- Ultimate Marvel:
- The Ultimates (2015): Simon Rodstvow initially appears as a man with pupil-less eyes that glow orange, and initially seems to just be a twisted counterpart to America Chavez. When a fight with the Ultimates occurs, it turns out Rostdvow isn't human at all, and they turn into a deformed, foetal monstrosity, described as "beyond naming".
- Ultimate Fantastic Four: After Reed Richards becomes the Maker, he drops all pretense of being human anymore and becomes an amorphous tentacle beast able to create false bodies from a hair-thin tendril and even stretching his brain to become smarter.
- Doctor Manhattan of Watchmen fame shows signs of becoming this over the course of the story due to his growing detachment from, well, everything. He ultimately embraces humanity, sort of, but not his own. At best you could say he recognizes the value of humanity. What he actually does is to go off to a galaxy far, far away to play God.
- Nate Grey a.k.a. X-Man drifted into this in his Shaman era, thanks to colossal Reality Warper powers that meant that he treated death as a minor inconvenience and the multiverse as his stepladder, and once walked into a room where the oxygen had been replaced with nitrogen without even noticing. He observed that he only did things like eat, drink, sleep, and breathe to make other people more comfortable around him, and had a fairly definite and occasionally terminal view on morality. As the narration observed on his return in Dark Reign when he paused during his rampage through a H.A.M.M.E.R. facility (Norman Osborn's evil SHIELD knock-off) to tell a frightened minion that yes, she should take that UNICEF job, "He is an Omega Class mutant with a social conscience. This can be... unsettling." While it was sharply curtailed following his Depower, when he got his powers back and then some, in the run up to Age of X-Man (where he literally became an entirely new reality), it returned with a vengeance, though he leaned back into his humanity towards the end of it. Short version? The more powerful he is, the weirder and more frightening he gets.
- Wonder Woman Vol 1: The Adjudicator in Judgment In Infinity appears as a 600' tall blue man with something like a star for a heart. He's also a mad ancient thing that exists between realities and goes around "judging" and casually destroying planets and all their inhabitants, by which he means all versions of a planet and its inhabitants across the multiverse at once after "judging" five representative versions. He's only stopped because his more powerful keepers let him play with worlds as a way to keep him from annoying them by thinking of them and Diana's use of her lasso on him while questioning who gave him the authority to destroy Earth makes him think of his keepers, who summon him for punishment in response.
- The Chilean comic Zombies en la Moneda reveals at the end that the culprit of the Zombie Apocalypse that the country is suffering is Augusto Pinochet... possibly. He has been resurrected by the members of an Ancient Conspiracy, his appearance is quite human, except for his eyes, which he permanently hides behind dark glasses, and from time to time must connect to a device that preserves his body and prevents it from changing to... something more unpleasant.
