About

Junior Scientist Power Hour is a comic by Abby Howard starring Abby Howard, co-starring Abby Howard's cat, Spoons. It updates every Monday!

The Birth Of JSPH

JSPH was started when Benoit, the site's developer, told Abby he would build a website if she would make comics because for some reason he thought she made good comics. Shortly after Abby started putting comics online, Penny Arcade opened applications for Strip Search, a reality show for webcomic artists with a prize of 15k and a year of free office space in the Penny Arcade offices. Being on the show gave Abby the exposure she needed to drop out of school and become the webcartoonist she always dreamt she could be, and the rest is history!

 

Strip Search

At the time, Abby was a struggling Evolutionary Biology student at McGill University, dreaming of being a super cool famous web cartoonist. She thought the idea of being on a reality show was...... weird and risky, but signed up anyway because she figured she had no chance. She wound up being one of twelve cartoonists selected to compete on the show.

The show filmed for two weeks during exam time, so she made the choice to sacrifice her education for this crazy thing that could wind up not making much of a difference in her life. She figured she was probably one of the last picked, there was no way a 20 year old punk could measure up to cartooning veterans. Every day she was at the house, she said to the cameras that it was "probably her last day" until the finale, when it really was her last day because there weren't any episodes after that.

The Last Halloween

Even though Abby loves doing JSPH, what she REALLY wanted to do was the Last Halloween, a story about a little girl with some very strange friends who is tasked with saving the world from countless monstrous horrors! It was a project she pitched during the finale of Strip Search, but it was not what Penny Arcade was looking for, so after Strip Search ended, she was able to launch a Kickstarter to raise enough money to last her through a year of cartooning. It was wildly successful, and Abby has been drawing spooky comics ever since.