Gosh Dang It / Webcomics

• Waste of Time has Seth.
  • This was actually later used as a plot device. When Seth and Jon switch bodies, Jon (in Seth's body) says the F-bomb to make Anna believe that he's not actually Seth.
• El Goonish Shive:
  • Lampshaded with Grace and her No Social Skills nature. Once, when something went wrong, she let off a long string of "Crud"s before apologizing for her choice of language. In fact, when she used the word 'dammit', everybody was stunned.
  • Elliot sheds his superhero form by changing into a more "mild-mannered" one.
• Gunnerkrigg Court flirts with this trope.
  • Most of the time, the harshest cusses we hear are "damn" and "hell", even from characters who would presumably have a more colorful vocabulary. The characters react realistically (namely, not at all) to this mild swearing, while the author facetiously reproaches characters in the comment section below the comic for their language. The result of all this is that the few times that harsh language is used, it's genuinely startling.
  • Kat is among those with the colorful language; amazingly, she's also the character to have used to strongest curse to date. Even if it bleeped out.
  • Eglamore probably uses stronger language here, but since it's all replaced by tamer substitutes by the time Parley tells it to Annie, the world may never know.
• The Doom comic, despite being having been made during the Dark Age, uses this trope. The closest it gets to a swear word is "sunova..."
  Doomguy: Sweet Christmas! Big-mouthed floating thingies!
• As the author of PepsiaPhobia wrote:
  Daisy McGuire: Oh, man. I just had a character say, "crap." There go my chances of there ever being a Gastrophobia Nicktoon.
• Sluggy Freelance: Would it be surprising to find out Santa's elves do that After his update, he started swearing for real ('' as well?
• Scary Go Round sees a bully with an interesting approach to swearing:
  Gary: I'm gonna funk his ship up. That melon farmer won't walk again...Now kiss off.
• Cwen's Quest:
  • The heroes all have censored swear words like $%#& but the villains use stand-in words and phrases like "Frex!!!" and "Lords of Darkness!", though the word "ass" gets through unedited.
  • It's lampshaded with this exchange
  Ace: ...so Knives would like to know why the frex they are dead!
  Sven: Frex?
  Ace: It's a faerie word Sven. Figure out what it means yourself, asshat.
• Averted in Captain SNES: The Game Masta.
  • Captain SNES is supposed to be kind hearted and the epitome of good. Alex swears so much that he uses it as an attack. It doesn't work due to "slippage".
  • It is played straight by Alex's captor, who at worst uses very mild cuss words and hates Alex for swearing so much.
• The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! (with Multiple Demographic Appeal) uses this. On the rare occasions when cursing would appear, it's depicted as Symbol Swearing. Jean's catchphrase is "Egad," and Bob and Molly are deliberately corny enough to say "Gosh," "Hokey Smoke!" or even "Jeepers!". The insectoid Nemesites say "Frass!" (bug poop) and the dragons say "fewmets" (dragon poop).
• In Penny and Aggie, when the devout and gentle Katy-Ann suspects her boyfriend has gone back to binge-drinking, she calls two of her friends for help. When Brandi says she's reluctant to get involved in others' relationship conflicts, Katy-Ann shouts, "Brandi, just get the heck over here!" A stunned Brandi thinks, "Holy f#$%, she just cursed at me."
• I Was Kidnapped by Lesbian Pirates from Outer Space!!!: "Golly, I'm sure in a pickle."
• Homestuck:
  • Equius Zahhak sticks to genteel curses like "fudgesicles" unless he's extremely flustered, and berates others for foul language, believing it to be a habit of the lower classes. He was once embarrassed for having used "shoot".
  • Jane is similarly mild in her expletives, although, unlike Equius, she doesn't care about her friends swearing.
  • Jake is an especially odd case where he both uses and averts this, constantly, often in the same sentence. This leads to some absolutely hilarious lines.
• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja almost never uses swearing, the exception being an occasion utterance of "jackass". In one issue, a NASA employee shouted "AAAA what the flarking heck!?" when his printer shorted out.
• Dumbing of Age:
  • The page image comes from this strip. Joyce doesn't swear, but sometimes she really wants to.
  • From a later strip, Joyce again lets Joe have it:
  Joyce: It'd better be, or I will fudge you up so dang hard everyone'll call you 'poopieface' 'cuz your head'll be stuffed up your own a-hole!
  Joyce: ...you all know what I meant.
  • The previous comic It's Walky featured a scene where characters offer Joyce money to swear. The artist, David Willis, has said that this is autobiographical, as he had Joyce's mannerisms when he was young and his friends also offered him money to curse.
  • Increasingly averted as Joyce has gone through Character Development and her vocabulary has degraded as a result. She's still just about the only character in the comic to never drop an f-bomb, though.
• In The Specialists, Max makes frequent use of the exclamation "Applesauce!" such as in this montage.
• Downplayed in Bob and George. Most of the time the characters will use minced oaths or be censored outright, but every so often something will happen that one character (usually Roll) can only respond to with a hearty "fuck".
• The Unspeakable Vault (of Doom) has the exasperated Cthulhoo occasionally exclaim, "Fthagn!".
• Super Doomed Planet:
  Dr. Crane: Exploding Planets! Dr. Gregor ffinch!
  Dr. Finch: Why, Maximilian Crane! I'd know your moronic expletives anywhere!
• From cartoon singles by Aaron Williams — "Gates of Heck":
  (one fiend to another): It's part of our new 'Family Friendly' policy.
• Nodwick - Piffany, whose language is so comically mild that you know it's serious when she says "darn" or "crud".
• In Olympus Overdrive Hades never uses curse words, because it's Persephone's duty as the Queen of the Underworld to carry out any curses Hades makes and she doesn't like doing it, so he took an oath to never swear.
• Noted in this strip of Phil Likes Tacos, with Phil calling Kick-Ass as "Kick A-Butt" and another employee calling Inglourious Basterds as "Inglourious Bees."
• Swearing in Girl Genius is generally on the mild side - justified, as it's set in alternate universe Victorian-era Europe. "Darn" is probably the most-used 'swear word', as well as various science-related words used as expletives. Agatha's one outburst, after being hit on the foot with a hammer by one of her creations, is censored with various mad science themed doodles and is helpfully 'translated' in a footnote.
  Agatha: [in footnote] Ooh, what naughty little devices, to so turn upon your creator! Oh! Indeed, my foot is in such excruciating pain! I shall construct a device that will give you such a whack, see if I don't!
• In Peter Parker: Foreign Exchange Student, Peter calls himself the "emissary of heck" while playing Super Robot with Eri. The panel even has a small note saying that he doesn't curse around Eri because she's a child.
• Silenziosa: When Alissabetta pricks her finger she exclaims "Son of a misbegotten woman of ill repute!" She immediately apologises to the women present for her language.
• Skin Horse: Nick the human-turned-helicopter had an auto-censor installed as part of his transformation - and much to his displeasure, it learns. When he discovered a pig animatronic found the word "pork" offensive, he started repeating it until the auto-censor replaced it with "mukluk".
  • He later finds a way around it by cycling through foreign curse words.
• While the bad guys favour Symbol Swearing, good guys in Archipelago swear like this:
  • Alice when struggling with a tightly tied bag:
  Alice: Crumbs! Toast crumbs! Toast crumbs with butter and jam you stupid bag!
  • Tin-Can Turtle when a plan derails:
  Tin-Can Turtle: Oh, crumbs.
  • Paolo calls Snow "son of a salesman".
  • Raven lets out a literal "What the heck?!" after a collision with an unexpected chair. He also gets the strongest actual words in the story, or at least he tries:
  Raven: Curse it, Snow! You soul thieving son of a b- *baseball bat connects with his solar plexus* -UHK!
• In Beanstalked, Jack is prone to using low-level swear words, such as substituting "flock" for "fuck".

---