"What do you think these things are for?"
Cochlea & Eustachia
is a surreal webcomic created by Hans Rickheit, featuring a pair of identical masked and scantily clad young women exploring a strange building. Later on they run into a third, and in a further story they encounter an entire room full of them (one of whom claims they look nothing alike). It's not clear where any of them came from.The first storyline completed after just 66 black and white pages, and has now been published in colour as a book. A second started in mid- to late-2014, this time in colour.
Cochlea & Eustachia contains examples of:
- Antenna Adjusting: A variation. In order to make a radio work, Fronky (see Shout-Out below) attaches antenna leads to a fork and sticks it into one of the girls' heads while the other strains to hold the set.
- Apocalypse How: A hint of this in the field of bones stretching to the horizon outside the building.
- Bag of Holding: The narrow-necked bottle from which Cochlea pours hundreds of small objects in the hope of finding something useful.
- Body Horror: After Cochlea has finished stapling(!) what's left of their dismembered bodies back together, Eustachia and the third girl end up conjoined with limbs all over the place, like a bizarre human starfish. They don't seem too happy with the arrangement, but Cochlea doesn't see any problem with it, and soon finds a good use for their new shape.
- Contrived Coincidence: At the end of the first story, Cochlea finds a paddle-powered raft that's worked by the same kind of see-saw handles as a rail handcart. It just so happens, those handles are exactly the right shape for the now-conjoined Eustachia and third girl to operate.
- Dada Comics: Although comedy isn't a major feature of this webcomic, there are several amusing moments and visual puns.
- Fanservice: Cochlea and Eustachia's dress code. Most of the time they wear extremely short dresses without underwear.
- Fan Disservice: Eustachia mostly naked, but also dismembered and eviscerated.
Ew. That's even before Cochlea starts stapling her guts back together... and getting all the bits in the wrong order. - Meaningful Name: The titular characters are named after parts of the ear's anatomy (the cochlea is the organ that converts sound to nerve impulses, and the Eustachean tube is the passage connecting the middle ear to the pharynx). Given the surrealist nature of the comic, it is an open question whether this is actually meaningful or not.
- Mind Screw: Trying to figure out where the story is going, or even if there is a plot. (For what it's worth, the author claims there isn't.)
- No Plot? No Problem!: The author has stated that the Cochlea & Eustachia storyline will be "completely unencumbered by tempo, character development, plot, or logic."
- Recursive Reality: Certain objects inside the building, including one of the heroines, contain entire living rooms—complete with furniture and occupants.
- Reset Button: The second story starts with both girls looking the way they normally do, ignoring Eustachia's bizarre fate at the end of the first.
- Shout-Out: In the second story there's an odd character who's referred to at one point as "Fronky". This may well be a reference to "Fronkensteen".
- Squick: See Fan Disservice above.
- Surrealism: The building being explored by the female protagonists is filled with random (and usually very strange) objects, and has... unusual spatial properties.
- Vapor Wear: Cochlea's and Eustachia's dresses are short enough to make their lack of underwear very obvious. Their skirts just barely covers their genitals but leave their butts exposed.
