UTC: Urgent Transformation Crisis is a Transformation Comic drawn and written by Jim Whaley. The protagonist is Cass Calloway, an 18-year-old girl who is a wannabe scientist and attends a very elite private high school for budding scientists. Cass's particular interest is genetics, and she and her classmates are working on senior projects that involve body alteration via genetic manipulation. The story starts when a rival student decides to get rid of his leading competition for the senior prize by transforming them into human-animal fusions using nanobots that alter their genes. He turns Cass into a fusion of human and goat; his other rival is supposed to get a dose of nanobots that will turn him into a human/flying squirrel fusion, but through a case of mistaken identity the squirrel bots go to Cass's thirteen-year-old brother Flint. How they deal with these changes forms the main plot.
Several side plots involve transformations to other characters, most of them fellow students. In particular, Cass's boyfriend Noah takes a dose of his own untested "salamander serum" and slowly changes into a human-size salamander. Several of the transformees also have to deal with the problem of their thoughts being changed by the instincts that come with their new forms.
The tone is generally lighthearted, but the consequences of the transformations are treated with the seriousness they deserve.
The first page can be found at https://www.cracklingspine.com/utc/comic/cover1
, and it continues for about 350 pages. The main story is complete, and it hasn't been updated in any way since 2024.
This webcomic provides examples of:
- Annoying Younger Sibling: Flint is definitely this to his older sister Cass. However, after they're transformed he gets much less so, as he tries to adjust to being a squirrel-boy and also watches her suffer with her much-less-beneficial transformation.
- Artificial Animal People:There's a lot of this going on. Most of the characters are students in a private high school that focuses on training cutting-edge new scientists, particularly in the life sciences. Many of them develop animal heads and other animal features as a result of experimenting on themselves. A few take it (or get it taken) further:
- Mad Scientist Morty's nanobots transform Cass into a fusion of human and goat.
- Flint is also unwittingly transformed, although in his case he becomes a fusion of human and flying squirrel.
- Cass's classmate (and boyfriend, though at first neither wants to admit it) Noah takes a dose of his own, untested serum and undergoes a Bit-by-Bit Transformation into a human-salamander cross.
- Keris, another student, is briefly transformed into a gigantic amalgam of human girl and miniature poodle.
- Katsuko has one of her experimental teddy bears malfunction and implant bear DNA in her genetic code. As a result, she becomes a humanoid bear.
- Thirteen comes at this from the other direction: she is a cat girl who was created by Morty in his lab.
- One minor character gives himself four spiderlike extra limbs, while another has insectoid eyes.
- Blessed with Suck: Several of the transformations turn out to be this.
- Noah's salamander serum gives him salamander abilities including resistance to fire and an almost-unlimited climbing ability. He loves these abilities — but as the process continues, he finds the salamander form comes with a lot of drawbacks. He can't go outside in cold weather because he is now cold-blooded and will quickly freeze to death. He has to wear a full-body suit to insulate him, keep his skin wet, and keep from leaving mucus on everything he touches. If the transformation proceeds too far, he'll even lose the ability to stand upright.
- Dr. Jennifer Attic, principal of Attic High, gets dosed with a serum that makes her younger. A lot younger. It's nice being younger - it fixes her arthritis and other aches and pains associated with aging — but it eventually reduces her to physically being about six years old. Her adult mind is still intact and she wants to act like an adult and be treated like an adult, but her physical appearance makes that almost impossible.
- Cat Folk:
- Thirteen is a humanoid cat. Her exact ancestry and what kind of material went into her genetic makeup are never revealed; Morty says only that he made her from scratch.
- Rameses Steel fits briefly, before his transformation turns him completely into a cheetah.
- Cursed with Awesome: Flint finds there are a lot of drawbacks to being a giant flying squirrel, but hey, he can fly!
- Demorphing Denouement: The final chapter sees Noah and Cass returned to human form.
- Foil: Cass and Flint have completely opposite reactions to their transformations: she hates being half-goat and is obsessed with finding a cure, while he loves being a flying squirrel and flatly refuses to be changed back. Several scenes between them use this for dramatic effect.
- Forced Transformation:
- Morty transforms Cass into a goat-girl in order to eliminate her as a rival for the top prize in the senior competition. He also tries to transform another rival, but a case of mistaken identity means that Flint gets that transformation instead.
- Morty tries to use a Transformation Ray to turn Keris into a cartoonishly overendowed girl. But she's holding her pet poodle when the beam hits her, so instead she becomes a ten-foot-tall dog-girl.
- Argo Archer transforms Dr. Mitchell, a particularly Jerkass teacher, into a large snake without any kind of warning or permission, and threatens to do the same to Cass. However, before that particular subplot is over he's been involuntarily transformed himself, into a vaguely wolflike monstrosity.
- Gone Horribly Right:
- Noah takes his salamander serum because he needs resistance to fire in order to rescue classmate Keris from a burning building. It works. But the serum continues working over the following days and weeks, changing him bit by bit into a humanoid salamander. He loses his hair, his skin turns red and develops spots, he grows a tail, and so on. Finally, it even starts to strip away the "humanoid" part.
- Flint's classmate Rameses Steel agrees to be a test subject for his older brother's experimental cheetah-transformation serum, because Rameses is enthralled by the thought of setting new track records using his new enhanced speed. At first the serum works just the way he wants it: within a few days, he grows a tail, yellow fur, claws on his hands and feet, and yes, develops incredible speed. However, the changes don't stop there; in a few more days, Rameses is a cheetah physically and mentally, with (as far as anyone can tell) no trace of his human self remaining.
- Insistent Terminology: Flying squirrels don't really fly. They glide. Flint knows this, but as far as he's concerned, what he does is flying, and don't you forget it!
- Keeping the Handicap: Flint gets transformed by Morty's nanobots into a fusion of human and flying squirrel. He finds that this brings a lot of problems, but the idea of being able to fly fires his already-active imagination. After Noah pushes his transformation further, so that now he can fly, or at least glide, he flatly refuses to be changed back to human form.
- Large Ham: Early in the comic, Morty is shown giving evil monologues to empty air and recording his own egotistical rants for posterity.
- The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: A common problem for the transformees. It's clearly worse for those who embrace their changed form rather than resisting it.
- Cass hasn't been a goat-girl for a day before she finds herself occasionally stuttering and turning words with long a sounds into bleating noises; however, she shows few other mental effects until the night she fully becomes a goat while trying to reverse the transformation.
- Almost immediately after his transformation, Flint starts holding his hands folded in front of him, like a squirrel does when sitting upright. He also has to fight off a variety of squirrelish impulses. After his second transformation, he pulls the sheets off his bed and twists them into a nest on the floor, and that's where he sleeps.
- Rameses Steel gets a shot of his brother's cheetah transformation serum. When it reaches full effect, it transforms him all the way into a cheetah, not only physically but mentally as well. Several chapters later, it's shown that there is effectively nothing left of his human mind.
- Nanomachines: Morty transforms Cass and Flint using nanobots that are programmed with the necessary animal DNA. In the last chapter, the nanobots are used again to transform Cass and Noah back to human.
- Reveling in the New Form: Sure it has some drawbacks, but on the whole, Flint thinks that getting turned into a giant anthropomorphic flying squirrel is "awesome". He uses his new body's abilities as often as he can, and says flatly that he wants to stay a flying squirrel, not return to being a normal human.
- Speaks Fluent Animal: After her transformation, Cass finds that she can talk to goats, and hear what they say in return. Her brother Flint makes the same discovery: after his transformation into a flying squirrel, he can speak to squirrels.
- Thicker Than Water: Flint starts out as Cass's Annoying Younger Sibling, and spends a lot of time snarking at his sister. After they're both transformed, though, his attitude changes and he becomes far more concerned about her than about his own situation. For her part, when Cass confronts Morty she's as angry over Flint's transformation as she is about her own.
- Transformation Ray: Morty uses one to transform Keris; later, Noah uses it to transform Dr. Attic to another were-poodle so she can fight her berserk daughter. It's used one more time to transform both Dr. Attic and Keris back to human.
- Valley Girl: Keris starts out as one. As her Character Development kicks in, though, she moves away from it.