Professor Awesome
Eric, better-known as Professor Awesome, was a mad scientist known to Jenny Everywhere in multiple realities. Although in some he was a genuine threat and enemy, in at least one universe, he was mischievous thirteen-year-old boy genius who lived in the same apartment building as Jenny and Kim.
Description
Physical appearance
Professor Awesome's primary trait was the lab coat he wore. (PROSE: Pit Stop, Morning After) In Kim's world, Eric was a “gangly” teenager. (PROSE: Pit Stop) The more villainous Professor Awesome of another universe bore a “scraggly goatee” in his early twenties, and later managed to grow it out into a full beard. He also had “perfect white teeth”. (PROSE: Morning After)
Powers and abilities
Eric was particularly skilled at robotics. Despite his scientific leanings, he didn't have much of a head for straight-up mathematics, finding calculator apps sufficient for his purposes. (PROSE: Misunderstandings)
Biography
In the Parallax Universe
- See main article: Professor Awesome (Parallax Universe)
One version of Professor Awesome was usually known as “Eric”, and was a generally benevolent boy genius, although he did consider himself a “mad scientist”. He lived with his mother in the same apartment building as Jenny Everywhere and her roommate Kim. (PROSE: Morning After, Pit Stop, etc.)
Wreaking havoc
In contrast to the friendly boy known Jenny Everywhere and Kim, another version of Professor Awesome was a bona fide supervillain. In his early twenties, he began to grow a “scraggly goatee” which he eventually grew out into a full beard. Like his boyish counterpart, this Awesome wore a long labcoat.
On one occasion, he built a first Time Pestle. This Time Pestle had been lost to him, but there was reason to think he might have built another, on a day when he initiated much havoc in the city where he and his Jenny counterpart lived, setting it on fire. Standing on a turret on his Omnibus, he taunted Jenny about her inability to stop him, laughing madly. Jenny, however, had a pistol secreted away, and was, regretfully, attempting to get a shot at him.
The Jenny who was neighbours with the boy-genius version of Professor Awesome once got an involuntary glimpse of these events due to shifter hangover while talking with her version of Professor Awesome, finding them understandably disturbing. (COMIC: Morning After)
Behind the scenes
In 2022, Aristide Twain created a full-body illustration of the classic, kid version of Professor Awesome. To date, this remains the only visual depiction of the character. Based on notes from Scott Sanford, he was depicted as black, a detail which had not yet been mentioned in Scott Sanford's Jenny Everywhere stories themselves at the time. Sanford later commented:
| I'd originally imagined him as a skinny pale white kid, a very stereotypical nerd. When asked about his hair color, I said brown and remarked that going purely by textual evidence there was no particular justification for any particular appearance or ethnicity. And I got this delightful picture. Apparently Professor Awesome is black now. Cool. |
| —Scott Sanford |
Aristide Twain's artwork of Professor Awesome.
| Incarnations of Professor Awesome | ||||||
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