Swearing in Comics

art by Hergé, of course

Hello, hello!
Before I begin my ramblings, may I remind you that the DD Awards are currently being served?

What's that you say? I just did?

Awesome!

F*cking awesome!

How did my “awesome!” change for you with the swear word, if at all? Did my voice in your head change its tone, and if so, to what? Annoyed? Ironic? Super excited, compared to the first ‘awesome’ I said?

There is a general consensus that swear words carry an emotional charge, big or small depending on the swear word itself and of course the context in which it is used. Therefore swearing in dialogue can and is being used in several different ways to evoke different reactions from the audience.

The three broad manners of use are:

To underline a scene’s gravity or how emotionally charged a character is feeling:
The more serious the message a character is conveying in terms of urgency, grimness, terror, etc, the more likely the dialogue to employ some swear words, especially for emphasis.

To demonstrate an escalation of the emotions in a scene:
The more ALL the characters in a scene begin to use swear words in their dialogue, the more an escalation (or unravelling) of a situation is communicated to the audience, creating a constant upping of the ante in the scene until climax.

To show the power pyramid within a constellation of characters in a scene, or a power struggle:
A character that will consistently use swear words to others while not having others swear back to him/her, is a character possessing more power over the others than vice versa. The more the rudeness that goes unchallenged, the more that character’s rank augments, without us having to show or tell anything further. The interaction says it all.

There is also an element of using swear words for comedy, but I really am not at all good at comedy on demand so I’ll leave that to someone better qualified than me :)

So what do you think?
Do you use swear words in your characters’ dialogue? Have you ever had swear words escalate (i.e. go from friggin’ to f*cking, etc)?
Do you use swearing in your comics for any other purposes?
And if you don't use swearing, how do you approach that element of human interaction?

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