YMMV / The Super Dictionary

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • "Lex Luthor is Superman's enemy. He wants to do bad things to Superman."
  • "Robin wonders when Batman will ever come. Robin wonders if he will ever come."
  • Supergirl to Superman: "Superman◊, you and me deserve a rest because we work so hard. We have earned a rest. We have deserved it for many, many years."
  • Joker to a bound Robin in a dungeon: "It will please me to keep you here. It will make me feel good. It pleased me to trap you."
• Adaptation Displacement: It can be easy to mistake the Native American characters Firehair and Tomahawk for Original Generation characters. The Dictionary has several of those already, and created them partially in order to diversify the cast, but they are both canon characters from The Silver Age of Comic Books. It doesn't help that Firehair appears very infrequently in comics today, while Tomahawk's comics stopped being published six years before the Dictionary was released.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: El Dragón is probably the most popular out of every Canon Foreigner in the book.
• Epileptic Trees: SR-12's name and the fact that she is referred to as being "brought to life" has made some readers wonder if she is actually a Robot Girl.
• Funny Moments: Thanks to the odd and simplistic style of writing, as well as some of the bizarre story choices, the entire book could count, not just the Lex Luthor stealing 40 cakes part.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The Joker cornering Robin in a dark room is disturbingly similar to A Death in the Family. (True, Robin is Dick Grayson here, not Jason Todd, but still.)
    The Joker: "There is no one here but you and me. There is no one except for you and me. We are alone."
    Robin: "You think you scare me, but you don't. You think you scare me, yet you don't."
  • The narrator says that The Joker should be a clown in the circus and use his talents to make people laugh. It was later revealed in The Killing Joke that the Joker was a former stand-up comedian who never found an audience that liked him, meaning that he had to turn to crime to support himself and his wife. Well, for a given value of "revealed..." It does apply to his film incarnation, though.
  • "What has Joker done to Batgirl?"
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Luthor being referred to as "terrible" in his bio now comes off like an accidental Ascended Meme.
  • It's mentioned that The Joker doesn't like that he is aging. This otherwise throwaway comment got more amusing when both Batman: Arkham City and Batman: Endgame turned him into an Immortality Seeker. (Though it might also be Harsher in Hindsight, given that "Arkham City" has him Killed Off for Real.)
  • Speaking of the Arkham games, Batman also has tension with an animal-themed super villainess dressed in a skimpy, tight outfit who fights him with a Doppelgänger Attack. Sounds familiar?
  • To get a leak fixed, Conjura calls two plumbers in red and green caps.
  • The narration claiming Joker could have used his looks and skills to become a legit clown instead of a supervillain is addressed again in Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker as part of Terry McGinnis's "The Reason You Suck" Speech to get under Joker's skin, where he mockingly asks if Joker couldn't find work as a rodeo clown following his chemical bath accident at ACE Chemicals.
• Ho Yay: Officially, Tomahawk and Jody are just Heterosexual Life-Partners, but the Super Dictionary has a tendency to refer to canon couples such as Green Arrow and Black Canary as "friends", causing some readers to interpret their relationship differently.
• Memetic Mutation: "When no one was looking, Lex Luthor took forty cakes. He took 40 cakes. That's as many as four tens. And That's Terrible."
• One-Scene Wonder: "Snake Hands", supposedly the "strangest" guy The Flash has ever met. Often cited as one of the more memorable parts of the dictionary despite being unnamed.
• Signature Scene: Lex Luthor stealing 40 cakes, of course.
• Tear Jerker: Robin wishing that Batman were his dad because "Dads are nice to have around." becomes really sad when you consider Dick's backstory.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Arguably, every character introduced in this dictionary could count, since they were never used in any actual comics. Here, they are given just enough room to give us a sense of their personality and setting, but not nearly enough room for any real storylines or character development.
• Values Dissonance: "Conjura is a black. She belongs to a race of people with dark skin. There are many blacks in this world." Ummmm...

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