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Transformation Comic - TV Tropes

  • ️Sun Jan 13 2008

A Transformation Comic uses transformation as the central plot device. A main character is transformed for either a short or a long term so the story can examine the consequences. Plots involving more characters or more transformations are just elaborations on this basic theme, though if the story involves multiple transformations or transforms multiple characters expect each transformation to present a different dilemma or illustrate a specific point.

Since transformation as a primary theme tends to appeal to a niche market, most examples are Webcomics, which can be published easily and cheaply, and usually with few or no editorial restrictions on content. While a Transformation Comic might have some Author Appeal or be slanted towards specific Fanservice, transformation can also be used to explore gender roles, racism, isolation, belonging, and the maturation process.

Common transformations include but are not limited to:

If one of the main characters has Functional Magic or Mad Science skills, more exotic transformations may show up from time to time.

Note that the vast majority of these comics focus on forced transformations — either a Curse on a specific individual, or a few characters who transform others as a habit (or hobby). For purposes of this page, examples should be limited to comics where the transformations are central to the storyline or themes.

Examples:

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Comic Books 

  • Animorphs, the Comic-Book Adaptation of the novel series, about a group of teens who gain the power to turn into animals. It manages to show the Body Horror aspect of the morphing process very well.
  • DC Comics:
  • Billy the Cat: A boy who is cruel to animals is punished by being (depending on the medium) transformed or put into the body of a cat. In the animated series this is more of a "Freaky Friday" Flip.
  • The Fly's original incarnation was a preadolescent boy who can transform at will into an adult superhero; however, the very first story played with the concept by means of a Cliffhanger ending where he didn't know how to change back; the very next story (which was part of the same issue) resolved this, however.
  • Hilda and the Mountain King (2019) involves the young blue-haired adventurer being turned into a troll against her will, and goes on a quest to find a way to change back into a human.
  • Marvel Comics:
    • The Incredible Hulk: Mild-mannered Dr. Bruce Banner transforms into the monstrous creature known as the Hulk whenever he gets angry.
    • Marvel Comics 2: Zane Yama-Marko, son of X-Men villain the Juggernaut, transforms into a super-strong and invulnerable giant.
    • Thor: Originally, the main character was mild-mannered disabled Dr. Donald Blake, who found the hammer Mjollnir and used it to turn himself into the Norse God of Thunder Thor. (Said hammer appeared as an innocuous walking stick whenever Dr. Blake turned back.) This was later retconned into Blake always having been Thor, but with his memory erased while he walked the Earth.
  • The Ultraverse: Prime is about a teenage boy named Kevin Green who can create an older alter ego he calls Prime. When the Prime body deflates, it shrivels into an organic-like green cocoon Kevin must come out of, lest he suffocates.

Comic Strips 

  • Bananaman: In this British comic strip, a young boy becomes an adult superhero named Bananaman by eating bananas.
  • An arc within the South African newspaper comic Madam & Eve had Mother Andersonnote  taking experimental drugs that briefly turned her into how the comic portrays the African cast, complete with the ability to speak Zulu, laughing at jokes mocking madams (despite being a madam herself) and even buying Mieliesnote  from the Mielie Lady instead of pelting her with her sling shot. It lasts for a couple of strips before she turned back due to the strip's Status Quo.
  • Safe Havens: Samantha Argus is a grad student at Havens University who has unlocked the genetic code that allows her to transform anyone or anything, including herself.

Manga 

Webcomics 

  • 1-600 is a comic about a boy who finds a mysterious number that allows you to turn into an animal once called.
  • Abstract Gender. Brian and Ryan are both on a Gender Bender; Brian (who likes it) can go back to his original form, while Ryan (who doesn't) can't, a cause of considerable irritation on the latter's part.
  • Accidental Centaurs: Two scientists become centaurs after an exploding teleporter sends them to a world where centaurs are real and humans are mythical. Other transformations ensue, usually at the behest of a tame genie, and a crossover with The Wotch ended with one of the main characters getting some of her powers...and the same basic move.
  • Addictive Science, the whole comic is based around transformation, mostly in the form of mad science.
  • The Adventures Of Superstar: An average everywoman is turned into a super buxom heroine and decides to new powers for good.
  • Angela's Magic Lesson: A spin-off of The Underburbs, in which a suburban town's denizens are transformed by a vampire into various Halloween monsters, this work is a Gamebook in which a young witch casts a transformation spell on herself, with the result decided by the reader.
  • The Beast Legion is completely built on the concept of transformation & magic. Most of the characters have their own pieces of armore called 'Beast Transfers' that allow them to turn into Mystical beasts with Awesome powers.
  • Becoming Hero: Webcomic that illustrates the shapeshift trope in its first issue, in which Pink uses her two identities, Jun and July, to betray her friends. This breaks a little bit of sci-fi ground by using the concept of the Barr body present in human female cells to explain her ability to warp between two identities ala Jekyll and Hyde.
  • Bodysuit 23: A comedic Slice-of-Life Webcomic driven the the main character — a male college student — obtaining a Full-Body Disguise that changes him into a woman when worn, which leads to him Living a Double Life between his male and female identities.
  • The Book of Lore: A collection of Gamebooks with a Framing Device about the guardians of the titular books. Multiple choices result in characters undergoing permanent transformations, both physical and mental.
  • Bound Together: A male-female couple are cursed so the man turns into a woman and the woman grows a penis whenever one of them verbally disrespects the other. Other transformations, including human-animal, are also part of the plot.
  • Buster Wilde Weerwolf, a comedy that features a straight human who turns into a "weerwolf" note  during the night.
  • Caribbean Blue: Cats and Cat Girls in adventures in the tropics.
    • Paprika: The prequel and sequel to Caribbean Blue.
  • Cat Nine. Myan, a cat, was given a magical collar that allows her to transform into any animal she wishes, or a catgirl.
  • The fancomic CharCole details a Pokémon journey from the perspective of a human-turned-Charmander.
  • Cheer!: A spin-off of The Wotch, featuring a quartet of Gender Bender cheerleaders, as well as an additional White Like Me Gender Bender (Peter Hall) who (unlike three of the other four) knows exactly what's happened to her. All of the Wotch regulars make appearances as well. One of the cheerleaders is fully aware of what happened, but likes herself and her friends better when they don't have excuses to be jerks.
  • Crimson Flag, starting at comic #158 many of the Funny Animal characters (including the queen, two of the protagonists, and the primary villain...) get transformed into more realistic foxes, who can't even speak without magic. The reason this transformation is possible is an important part of The Reveal near the end. Earlier an important secondary character voluntarily transformed into a dragon or a three-eyed feral fox.
  • Crossworlds began as a side story to Accidental Centaurs and is tied to The Wotch through it. While its plot isn't entirely tied into transformation, the artist uses it often enough that it seems to qualify. (That, and the artist draws transformation art on his other website seems to help.)
  • Demon Eater has demons that change form every time they eat another demon. It's a dog eat dog world for reals. Saturno the main character has so far been in 30 different forms and counting.
  • Discordia is a low-key strip about a man who's been transformed into a woman. A character also has the power to transform anyone but the aforementioned, but she's an innocent, albeit half-god, little girl, and mostly uses it on command. A consequence of her innocence, however, is that she can't produce a male form, even if the target started that way.
  • The Dragon Doctors: Four magical doctors, a shaman/therapist, a surgeon, a magical scientist, and a wizard all get their respective genders reversed in the first chapter while trying to cure a cursed valley that causes everything within it to be female. They wind up stuck that way, and deal with that as they continue to diagnose and cure unusual diseases, curses and other problems — their methods often involving additional transformations — in a Schizo Tech fantasy setting.
  • El Goonish Shive: From Gender Benders to shapeshifting, magic to mad science, EGS showcases every form of transformation known to Dan. Every major character has been transformed at least once. In fact, one could even argue that a character isn't truly a main character until they've been transformed at least once (Though being transformed does not necessarily make someone a main character).
  • Endtown: Planet is reduced to a dustbowl and 99% of the human race dies. The survivors are made up of transformees into ravening monsters, transformees into FunnyAnimal anthros, or intact humans who are genocidally hunting down the first two groups, and a few hidden enclaves with human/anthro populations.
  • Exiern is the story of a barbarian adventurer turned into a woman by a sorcerer's spell gone awry. Hilarity and Fanservice ensue in equal measure, as well as other characters transforming in various ways. The sub-comic Dark Reflections takes the same plot and spins it around as a What If? the hero didn't save the princess in time. In this version the gender-changed hero/heroine ends up mind-controlled by the Big Bad and becomes his bimbo Dragon.
  • Foxy Flavored Cookie is a webcomic of the Animorphism variety, as the main character is bitten and then transformed into a fox, after which he has to join a community of anthropomorphic animals living hidden from humans.
  • Gender Swapped is similar to Misfile and Abstract Gender in that the main characters have to deal with a form of permanent Gender Bender. There's also some age regression involved.
  • The Good Witch begins with the former holder of the title passing it on to a transgirl named Angel, fulfilling her wish to be a cisgender girl (and retconning everyone's memory that this had always been the case.) As the Good Witch, Angel has amazing transformation powers...that she's severely abusing.
  • High School Changed Me: the predecessor to MSF High. While not the premise of the webcomic, transformations into other species or genderbending were quite common.
  • One of the main characters within Housepets! is a human who had been turned into a dog. Story arcs where he's the main protagonist tend to involve him trying to come into grips with the fact that he's now a dog who was once human.
  • I Dream of a Jeanie Bottle by the same author is about a guy transformed into an I Dream of Jeannie-style genie with her best friend being her master.
  • Jet Dream concerns the adventures of a Blackhawk style Multinational Team of aviators, the Thunderbird Squadron, after being transformed from T-Birds to T-Girls.
  • Jill Trent, Science Sleuth, the Remix Comic version, features a male hero transformed by the wonder element Femavium into a woman with the proportional brain cells of 58 girls.
  • Knuckle Up, the entire plot of the series is to have titular character Hawke to turn back into male after being trusted by a witch girl to turn into a female to bounty hunt a creepy overweight male.
  • Lusty Argonian Maid'd, by Valsalia (the same artist that created Out-of-Placers), is a fancomic of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that features various characters undergoing Karmic Transformation as a result of a Daedric God's curse and having to still save the world in spite of them.
  • Magical Girl Neil is the story of a high school boy who inherited his family's thousand-year tradition of defending our dimension from Oni as a magical girl thanks to being an only child.
  • Misfile. Ash is a Gender Bender and Emily has been hit with a Fountain of Youth. The former is used to deconstruct most gender bender tropes and the latter is a very subtle use of the trope as she's only "lost" two years. They just happen to have been two very important years from her perspective.
  • MSF High features frequent transformations (in which the victim always, almost always winds up female), mostly at the hands of the nurse, or occasionally Lovable Rogue Rainer. The victims have the option of reversing them at the end of the day, but seldom do, for various reasons. The artist of its predecessor, High School Changed Me, quit over, ahem, Creative Differences and later put a Take That! in his own strip when a familiar-looking Spear Carrier wishes to be turned into a woman.
  • New World has a large number of magical transformations, most of which involve both genderbending and either age regression or furry transformation (or in the case of Mina, all three at once). It has since been rebooted as a straight Gender Bender comic, Spiderwebs...and then re-re-booted as New World again.
  • Out-of-Placers: an exiled refugee from a defeated country is pushed further out of place when he is transformed into a Yinglet, a small weird creature like a cross between a rodent and a shorebird. Worse, he's been transformed into a female Yinglet, which gives him significant gender rarity value among his new people but causes his human employers to give him an offer he cannot refuse to serve as an "envoy" (spy, actually) in the yinglet's rather oddly matriarchal society.
  • Panthera: A webcomic about a group of high school teens who transform into Big Cats in order to help their chemistry teacher wage war on some kind of "Evil Organization".
  • Paradigm Shift is a Buddy Cop Comic centered around werecreatures being real.
  • Professor Amazing and the Incredible Golden Fox: Isla Grace receives a fox-shaped engagement ring from her husband-to-be, Parker, which gifts her with the ability to transform into a fox (both anthropomorphic and full fox versions). She then feels it's only appropriate to put her new powers to use in the service of her community.
  • Rain Burn: A comic about the bitter dragon Brand and the sweet quetzalcoatl Saida, who end up in eachothers bodies in a spell gone wrong. Made by one of the duo behind Crimson Flag.
  • Ruby's World has the main character turned into a nine foot tall giantess, though this soon becomes the least of her problems.
    • Ruby Nation continues Ruby's story, as well as introducing Elise, a girl who has apparently sprouted large metal wings.
  • Sailor Ranko: A crossover fan comic about the hilarity a transforming martial artist Ranma can bring to the Sailor Moon setting.
  • Sailor Sun is about an actor transformed into an actress by two unethical producers in order to add verisimilitude to his/her role as a boy transformed into a magical girl.
  • Same New Woman follows Marita, an ordinary librarian who wakes up one morning with a hyper-muscular body and extraordinary strength. She tries to go on with her old life but finds her world increasingly out of control.
  • Scaled Up: A time-traveler is turning into a dinosaur thanks to his Time Machine running into an error. Forced Transformation is also frequent in the story.
  • She !s me (Oh no! I'm a girl!): The story of a guy who one day wakes up as a gal. Don't think of this as a funny bodyswitch comedy, but as a serious evaluation about the question "What would you really do if ...?"
  • Shifters is a Webcomic heavily involved with Werecreatures.
  • Skin Deep reverses the usual take on this subject since the main characters are all mythological creatures transformed into humans. In this case human is the transformation. However, because of how the transformation works if they have children while human (possibly with human partners) their children are born human, and can actually think they're regular humans until it's definitively proven that they're not.
  • Somewhere Different, about a boy who is run over by some scientists, who bring him to their lab to heal him but also take the opportunity to experiment on him.
  • Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki. Yuuki, of course, is a Gender Bender for the long haul. Hermod and Loki are both currently in Animal Transformation, with Loki additionally being a plushie.
  • Spinnerette: A Freak Lab Accident leaves a mild-mannered grad student Multi-Armed and Dangerous; any resemblence to another costumed webslinger is purely intentional - and hilarious.
  • Synthea is a trope-filled comic about a amnesiac woman ending up in a Stasis pod right before death being woken up in the distant future by a good Mad Scientist using experimental ancient biotech that gave her a body with the consistency of lime jello — a so called Slime-Girl. Synthea gains some powers from the shift — she can change shape at will, stretching, punching, creating mallets, etc, but her control over her body is very limited, as she oozes and drips all over the place. She even has to sleep in a barrel as when unconscious she reverts to a big puddle. She's also apparently physically immortal — she's been cut up, blown up, and vacuumed up by a sapient humanoid vacuum with little more than a headache.
  • T Random Watch has Grant and Amy both experience transformations, as well as one of the government agents.
  • The Transformistress: The entirety of this creator's online comics, short stories, and other assorted works focus on Transgender euphoria, depicting characters being magically transformed so their bodies match their inner gender, sometimes with additional magical flair such as becoming a Cute Monster Girl.
  • Trader Lydia: a comic about the dark gnome Lydia who sets her shop up in a Louisiana bayou, and hilarity ensues. Two transformations occur early on in the comic, but then the majority of the humor comes from the absurdity of the situation.
  • Troop 37 focuses on a ten-year-old boy turned into a sixteen-year-old girl for reasons that, as a rule, are not to be explained. Written by first caller.
  • Type Trainer, a Pokémon the Series fancomic about Ash getting turned into a Pikachu.
  • Urgent Transformation Crisis is surprisingly serious about its subject matter. The transformations are usually one-way, less fan-servicey than normal, and the implications are taken far more seriously than in other strips of this nature. Hard-to-reverse transformation with life-changing effects would be a crisis, after all.
  • Welcome to Chastity: A college freshman moves into a town where all the women have huge breasts. Not long after she starts growing a huge pair herself.
  • Wereworld: revolves around Steve, a cyborg who comes to the eponymous planet looking to make his body stop rejecting the implants. The planet, Sidra, is inhabited by several species of human-animal transforming hybrids.
  • Wingstix: a user-generated Stick-Figure Comic in which characters are constantly changed from one form to another by their fun-loving god, Man.
  • Witchprickers: Ilemauzer, a timid familiar bat, asks the cheery Old Scratch to turn her into a human, only to turn into a Humanoid Animal instead.
  • The Wotch. The title character and most other magic users in the strip tend to rely heavily on transformation spells. Interestingly, due to the nature of her powers, Anne is unable to be a Gender Bender herself. But she and her friends have undergone many transformations, some voluntarily. A number of supporting characters are permanently genderbent, with a special mention going to Mingmei, who has a trifecta of Gender Bender, Fountain of Youth and Asian Like Me. She used to have Not Himself as well, but her personality seems to have reintegrated. There are also a werewolf, a werecat , a couple who swap bodies every so often as a Running Gag (and, amusingly enough, she enjoys it and wants to keep it up), and a formerly-human centaur, just in case the gender games weren't enough.
  • Zebra Girl. The title character is permanently stuck with the body of a demon. Probably the least Fanservice-y example of the genre — the fact that Sandra's every bodily secretion is now incredibly acidic might have something to do with that.