No PA, but technically, yeah. The bench was a site made by the PA team which was like stripcreator, only you had to make your comics in paint or psp or whatever. They supplied some templates (found in the PA catagory are those templates), and people made comics.
After a while people would make entire new characters, completely new scenes/poses for the PA characters.
I forget why they shut the site down, but it used to have a slogan "open-source comics". Every (Friday?) tycho would post all the submitted strips and make comments about his favorite new strips. It was pretty cool.