Listening to 11.975 MHz is a Webcomic started in December 2002 by Ethan Forsythe.
And it's ... really weird. It's about a girl (whose name is never given within the comic but Word of God says is Deco Bleu
), and her, um... adventures in a very surreal dream world.
The comic is filled with obscure references (especially to shortwave radio), and the comics sometimes contain messages to the author's friends. These are incomprehensible to anyone else.
It can be found here (currently down, but the strip has since been made available on the creator's Patreon page.).
In late 2014 the author re-launched the comic as a self published indy comic, "11.975 MHz", which is available via ComiXlogy for a small fee. The updated version is simultaneously much less and much more surreal than the original, switching the storytelling style to a more traditional comic format while retaining much of the Dadaesque elements.
"Deco and her mother, Pascale, wake up one day to find themselves in "The Archives", a near-infinite warehouse of every known archetypal location in the Multiverse."
This webcomic provides examples of...
- Arc Words: wm
- Art Evolution: As in most webcomics, the art gets better and better as the comic progresses, with a particularly noticeable shift when the shading style changes. Another trend is how Deco seems to be looking younger and younger.
- Badass Cape: This one here.
- Barbie Doll Anatomy: Averted like crazy with the Brazilian hippie, aka Fussy Britches. Most pages with her are somewhat NSFW due to nudity.
- Beautiful All Along: The Girl Who Speaks Math (Caboose) is adorable when she takes her super-thick spiral glasses off.
- Big Ball of Violence: here.
- Bilingual Bonus: Averted; while the comic uses a myriad of languages (see below) all of them are apparently nonsense aside from the references, which are always in English.
- Bilingual Dialogue: Multilingual would be more accurate; between Deco's French, Lunchbox's Chinese, Fussy Britches' Portuguese with occasional Italian, whatever the white-haired devil speaks, the English used by signs and assorted one-off characters, and the calculus equations used by Caboose, this trope is present in spades.
- The white-haired devil's speech in at least one strip seems to be Dutch/Flemish. Elsewhere she seems to speak Greek, or at least in Greek letters. Sometimes it’s Dutch/Flemish written in Greek.
- And starting here, a floating mouse-like creature (with a distinct resemblance to Pikachu) speaks Catalan.
- The white-haired devil's speech in at least one strip
- Body Horror: Whatever is happening on
this page, it's a good thing Deco is turned the other way... - Can't You Read the Sign?: Of course the signs warning of the deep, deep hole ahead aren't worth noticing. Though neither Deco nor Lunchbox actually speak English, so I suppose it's justifiable.
- Catgirl: Deco, in one comic only, and these one-off characters.
- Character Catchphrase: Deco says "Bassoon!" quite a bit at the beginning.
- The phrase "drink Early Times" shows up with fair frequency in later comics. Early Times is a brand of whiskey, by the way.
- The radio with legs keeps repeating the phrase "Zachary. Acetaminophen. Beige."
- Cute Mute: Antithesis (Fussy Britches' daughter) has blank speech bubbles.
- Dada Comics: Of which this is a prime example.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The character often called "The Girl Who Speaks Math" is exactly that. Though her real name is Caboose.
- Fanservice: The characters are randomly naked every so often. (Here's an example.)
- Godiva Hair: Deco, in this comic.
- Guest Strip: Only one, by someone named Divine. It makes about as much sense as the rest of the comic, as in none.
- Innocent Fanservice Girl: The Brazilian hippie girl who rarely wears pants or underwear and frequently doesn't even button her shirt.
- Large Ham: The TWONKY. A boon to mankind? Or its terrible fate?!
- A Shout-Out to a short story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, alias Lewis Padgett, and/or the movie adaptation thereof.
- Mind Screw: Almost inverted, it's the parts that near comprehension that are disorienting.
- Mood Whiplash: The comic is cute and whimsical, right? Then you have this, which is pretty damn depressing. Then it's back to cute and whimsical.
- Ms. Fanservice: Fussy Britches, the hippie. See Innocent Fanservice Girl above.
- Mushroom Samba: What do you expect from brownies made by a hippie?
- Shout-Out: Lots and lots, particularly to old video games such as Pac-Man (Deco's headband has the game's titular character and a ghost, not to mention this), Zork (when Deco and Lun Che Box fall into a pit, the opening text is in the background), and plenty to Super Mario Bros.. There are also excerpts from The Idiot at Home by John Kendrick Bangs every once in a while, and one comic has the last few lines from Tennyson's Sir Galahad.
- This comic references the last two lines of the song "Truckstop" by Marty Stuart.
- There are many, many references to the end text of Lemmings.
- Deco must have dialed the 80's into the Dial-A-Decade machine, because Steve Dallas walked out.
- This comic
- Talkative Loon: Nearly all characters gives off this impression.
- Sistine Steal: Tag!
- The Unintelligible: EVERY. SINGLE. CHARACTER. But especially Deco herself, the Anime Chinese Girl Lunchbox, and Caboose.
- Unsound Effect: Many of the "sound effects" are things like celebrity names. Actually, none of them are real sounds...
- Wholesome Crossdresser: One-off character Sinbios
- Wrench Wench: Caboose.
