Totally Radical / Comic Books

• In the early Silver Age, Snapper Carr was essentially the Justice League of America's collective sidekick. He spoke in constant slang and was always fixing hot rods, going to baseball games, and so on. Acknowledged in the JLA/Avengers Crossover when Marvel's Rick Jones says that Carr is an okay guy "no matter how he talks".
• There's a What If? issue where Rick Jones becomes the Hulk instead of Bruce Banner. This youthful Hulk mixes Hulk Speak with the early 60s version of this trope to hilarious effect:
  "Don't jive Hulk with fancy lingo, bug-man! Hulk doesn't dig it!"
• Rick Hulk reappears in Contest of Champions (2015), where he still talks like this.
• Bob Haney's work on the original Teen Titans comics. The least subtle display takes place within one such issue, which features Robin deducing that a message from an adolescent is a forgery based on its "vernacular". Daddy-O.
• The canceled New Warriors 2020 line-up included a hero named Screentime, described as a "meme-obsessed" teen hero whose brain was connected to the internet thanks to experimental "internet gas". Two of his teammates went by the names Snowflake and Safespace, common internet buzzwords, with an apparent interest in livestreaming their heroics. All of this made it painfully apparent that the writers were trying to appeal to late-2010's teen culture, and the ensuing mockery (and backlash, since "snowflake" and "safespace" are usually used online to mock liberals and minorities) is largely suspected to be the reason why the series never got released.
• Teen Titans gets mocked in a 1990s story in The Flash 80-Page Giant, which exactly duplicates the ludicrous slang from the original stories. It turns out to be a tale the former Kid Flash is spinning to Impulse. Bart points out that nobody ever really talked like that - and even if they did, it wasn't when the twentysomething Wally was a teenager.
• Silver Age Spider-Man comics deserve special mention. While the original Ditko comics were pretty good as far as slang went, when Peter enters college and gains a social life, the characters' slang gets crazy out of hand. Mary Jane is particularly impossible to understand◊.
  • Lampshaded by Aunt May and Aunt Anna also speaking in this manner, on a splash page◊.
  • An issue of Deadpool spoofed this when the title character time travels back to the 1960s and encounters the then-current versions of Spider-Man's cast. Their constant overuse of inexplicable 60s slang is a running gag throughout the issue, with Mary Jane being the worst offender. And upon hearing Harry Osborn speak, Deadpool actually asks if he is having a stroke. This isn't the only time Deadpool's travelled back in Marvel history and made fun of slang. Brian Posehn's run has featured an 80's issue with alcoholic Tony Stark & a 70's issue (complete with afro-wearing Deadpool) trying to join Heroes For Hire and fighting an albino pimp called "White Man". As one would imagine, there's PLENTY to make fun of.
• An issue of Superboy addresses this when the titular character seeks to reinvent himself after being given the cold shoulder by a girl for his over-use of early-90's cliches and expressions. However, all this accomplishes is trading sunglasses for bug-eyes (which were never seen again), a leather jacket for a PVC one, losing the piercings for a scruffy goatee, ditching his belts altogether, and saying "Word. Reprezent." instead of "Don't Mess with the S!"
• Superman's robot Kelex (a new robot built in the likeness of Jor-El's robot with the same name), who looks after the Fortress of Solitude for him, went through a phase of talking in amusingly awkward slang. This phase seems to have passed.
• Robin (1993): Tim Drake had a habit of using exceedingly outdated slang in his civilian persona when doing things to cover up his secret ID, like intentionally messing up in gym. As none of his friends did this Ives in particular often came off as though he was very sarcastically putting up with a friend's bizarre eccentricities and disconnect with his own age group.
• A large portion of Tyler's dialogue from Jurassic Strike Force 5 consists of him stating how everything is "cool" and "awesome." He says "totally" so many times that it's a borderline Verbal Tic.
• In Nextwave, Boom Boom uses phrases like "Oh noes!" and "ZOMG!" in both everyday conversation and periods of extreme stress. However, this is due to her actually being completely brainless, in the most literal sense of the word. Warren Ellis, the comic's writer, practically lives on the Internet and was taking the opportunity to lambast some of its stupider members.
• The acid overdose survivor Arkady in Freakangels apparently starts talking in lolcat when drunk. "I can has vodka" indeed.
• DC Comics's miniseries The Weird from the late eighties had the "son" of its eponymous character speak in terribly inaccurate slang — flying with his pseudo-father is apparently "bogus" and The Weird's abilities are "the dudest". Jim Starlin: good writer, terrible slangologist.
• The front cover of DC's Raven miniseries proudly states, "Finally in Her Own Emo Series!". Someone at DC is apparently unaware that emo, when applied to a person, is generally considered an insult.
• Fray's anning hab of abrevving half of the words in every sent she speaks has a sim eff to the more comm vers of this tro on a lot of peep; that is, making it both hard to under and frustringly diff to igno^translation Fray's annoying habit of abbreviating half of the words in every sentence she speaks has a similar effect to the more common version of this trope on a lot of people; that is, making it both hard to understand and frustratingly difficult to ignore. Lampshaded in Buffy Season 8 story arc The Time of Your Life, where Buffy is thrust forward in time and actually meets Fray. Upon hearing Fray speak, Buffy's response is, "Uh....English?" Later, after hearing more of Mel's Future Slang and such, Buffy makes a comment amounting to "I should have been kinder to the English language when I had the chance".
• Archie Comics is notorious for this trope. For example, one late-80s story has a lifeguard tell a surfing Veronica, "I really dig the way you attacked those waves with your rad moves". A contemporary in-house ad for an Archie calendar features a cartoon teenager, sporting a ridiculous multi-colored mohawk, oversized shades that Elton John would reject, and mismatched-color clothes telling the reader, "I ordered mine!" Like gnarly, daddy-o, if a rad hepcat teen like him bought one, I better slap down the bread too, yo yo yo.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics), despite advertising itself as "The world's most way past cool comic!", isn't actually terrible about this when it comes to its title character. Vector, on the other hand, sounds like he's having a stroke in a good half of the panels he's in. This was eventually toned down, then hand-waved as his initial attempt to hide his Downunda accent.
• During the 80s crossover series Secret Wars (1984), most of the cast is notoriously guilty of this. In particular, She-Hulk, when punching the Enchantress, declares "Oh wow! That was, like tubular, you know — TO THE MAX!" This example is even more absurd when considering the fact that She-Hulk is a high-end attorney.
• 2000 AD's D.R. & Quinch written by Alan Moore has the title characters describe literally everything as "totally amazing," "unbelievably awesome," or, like, "incredibly stupid."
• Subverted by Journey into Mystery (Gillen) (which used to be The Mighty Thor), where Kid-Loki has gotten his hands on a Stark-Pad and is casually surfing the internet. One hopes he won't go Totally Radical on us, and then not only does he use the same formal grammar as any Asgardian while typing, but he explains what he has discovered on the internet in equally archaic terms, making for great one-liners:
  Loki: The humans of the Internet are uncouth!
  Loki: I've primarily discovered that mortals like to rut and chronicle the experience pictorially.
• Later in Young Avengers, Kid Loki displays some shades of the trope because he tries to fit in with a bunch of Midgardian children and also body snatching, so technically he isn't Kid or even a kid anymore. He loses it when he gets an age-up, though... and replaces it with occasional Buffy Speak.
• X-Men: In the 1980's and 1990's, Jubilee was guilty of this just about anytime she spoke. She even says "totally like radical" in Uncanny X-Men #247. It's so much worse in Generation X, where pretty much all the teens on the team were guilty of speaking this way.
• Sonic the Comic: One story revolves around Tails visiting a hypnotist to make him cool like Sonic. It works too well and Tails ends up becoming a backwards baseball cap wearing, sunglasses sporting 90s cool kid. Sonic is the only one who dislikes the "cool" new Tails.
• Played for Laughs in Revolutionaries with its portrayal of Sgt. Savage. Once a Super-Soldier from 1944, an accident involving a magical artifact teleported him to 1994, where he promptly became obsessed with 90s culture. He’s now a Liefeld-style hero who fights ninjas and skateboarders while spouting one-liners like “eat my shorts!” and calling things “totally tubular”. Even after being teleported further into the future (to 2017), he continues to talk this way, much to the confusion of the Revolutionaries.
• Used as a plotpoint in an issue of The Brave and the Bold, the first appearance of the Teen Titans (though the team would be officially formed some time later). Robin (Dick Grayson) realizes that the letter from the children of the town that were kidnapped must have been written by the villain - Because any real teenager would never say music, they would say Jives.
• Blue Monday: Erin makes fun of Bleu's old-fashioned slang, to which Bleu shoots right back.
  Bleu: (to Clover) Come on, chickie baby, let's go shake it!
  Erin: Bleu, you have the squarest vocabulary on the planet.
  Bleu: You're the one who said "square". Who uses that anymore?
  Erin: I was using it to make a point!
  Bleu: Erin, you're so rad. So boss. So much hipper than me.

---