I’m Ava Pun, and this is my webcomic! Follow the adventures of the elements of the periodic table here at Academy 118, a strange school located at the heart of the universe.

The first stirrings of what would later become Academy 118 began in December 2014 when I was home sick with the flu watching Periodic Videos and reading xkcd. In the spring of 2016, I decided to make it into a webcomic and started working on this website. Unfortunately, I also injured my wrist that year (carpal tunnel and tendinitis) and was unable to do much for a while.

The frequency of updates for this comic is inversely proportional to the amount of homework I currently have multiplied by how much my hand hurts. Apart from Academy 118, you can also check out my two comic strips The Amazing Adventures of Flat the Fish and A Slightly Surreal Comic here.

Some great resources I used while doing research for this comic:

• Periodic Tales (Hugh Aldersey-Williams, 2011)
• Nature’s Building Blocks (John Emsley, 2011)
• The Elements (Theodore Gray, 2009)
• The Disappearing Spoon (Sam Kean, 2010)
• The Royal Society of Chemistry periodic table

Academy 118 runs on a messy custom webcomic engine that I threw together five minutes after learning PHP. You can download it here, if you really want to. You can also find out more about the other stuff I make and do here.