At age 30, cartoonist Caroline Cash has landed her dream job: the comic strip Nancy.
Cash, daughter of Sarah and Alex Cash of Mount Pleasant, has had a winding career path that started with Charleston County School of the Arts (SOA) and art school. It blossomed into becoming an indie comics powerhouse, and now, the latest artist to bring to life the 88-year-old cartoon featuring Nancy and Sluggo.
DIY arts education
Cash left town in 2014 after graduating from SOA to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).
“Even though I loved Charleston, I wanted to continue pursuing an arts education, and I wanted to try living in a bigger city,” Cash said in a recent interview from her home in Philadelphia. “I chose Chicago because SAIC gave me the biggest scholarship — and because I liked the band Fall Out Boy, and they were from Chicago. I was 18, so that was my reasoning.”
As an undergrad at SAIC, she rekindled a love of creating comics.
“I was taking a lot of print classes, and I quickly got bored of printing posters and drawings. I always loved comics and made them as a kid, so I figured I’d try drawing comics to print. I immediately was obsessed and then spent all my time drawing and printing comics.”
SAIC also enabled Cash to find and cultivate an audience by printing and publishing her work herself, by embracing the DIY ethos of “zines” — essentially short print run, self-published “minicomics.”
“I did an offset apprenticeship, so I had the opportunity to use an offset machine, which made printing large quantities of comics easy. I started going to zinefests and small comics fests in 2016, and sold them there. Then, I kept self-publishing.”
This led to her debut graphic novella — and first taste of wider distribution — with Girl In The World, published by San Francisco-based indie comic imprint Silver Sprocket in 2019.
“My senior year of college, Silver Sprocket approached me to put out a longer comic, so I put out Girl In The World with them right after I graduated,” Cash recounts.
Throughout the 64 pages of Girl, Cash follows a group of friends as they navigate the Chicago nightlife, with stops for hipster speakeasies, Facebook events and the existential angst of burgeoning adulthood in a gig economy. The work also showcases a foundational cornerstone of Cash’s bibliography — observational slice-of-life storytelling with equal doses of cynicism, absurdity and heart.
Post-SAIC, however, Cash discovered a truth that she’d later draw from for a New Yorker collaboration titled “Alumni Success Stories of Art-School Graduates” and an autobiographical short titled “Art School Confidential.” As her avatar in “Confidential” puts it, “You quickly learn that there are no art world jobs that actually pay a living wage.”
To earn a living wage, Cash instead picked up a full-time job at Quimby’s, a Chicago-area independent bookstore focused on more esoteric publications, including graphic novels and zines. Along the way, she continued an arts education of her own design — learning from those whose books lined the shop’s shelves.
“Working there, I was able to see how so many people smarter than me had self-published work, how they marketed their work, etc.” Cash recalled. “I also had the privilege of learning how the industry works from the retail side of things. I learned first-hand which publishers were easy to work with, which did a good job promoting their books to bookstores, and how the book trade economy worked.”
PeePeePooPoo powerhouse
Adding this newfound education in self-publishing and marketing to her DIY ethos, Cash forged a new self-published endeavor — her “one-person anthology” titled PeePeePooPoo.
“In 2021, I was still working at Quimby’s, and I was dating this really talented screenprinter. I wanted to screenprint a comic, so [we] screen-printed a thousand copies of the first issue of PeePeePooPoo. I thought I’d have stock for a long time, but it sold out in just a few months.”
She contacted her friends at Silver Sprocket, which did a reprint and published three more issues. That allowed Cash to craft autobiographical stories through her lens of a queer, twentysomething, indie cartoonist living in Chicago and now Philadelphia.
Described by Silver Sprocket as “Caroline Cash’s take on the classic ’60s underground comic,” it both parodies and pays homage to the alternative and underground voices she found so influential at Quimby’s, including Charles Burns (Black Hole), Daniel Clowes (Eightball), Alison Bechdel (Fun Home), and Trina Robbins (Wimmen’s Comix).
PeePeePooPoo’s scatalogical title and quirky numbering — which uses the ribald #69 and #80085 (aka “BOOBS” in calculator speak) and stoner #420 before releasing a #1 — set a tongue-in-cheek tone.
Meanwhile, its stories showcase the same observational, cynical and absurdist humor of Girl In The World, now all the more personal and honed with Cash’s own cartoon avatar as the main character. The series shined a spotlight on Cash with positive reviews and accolades, including an Eisner Award — the comics industry’s equivalent of an Emmy or Oscar.
In short, Cash became that rarity in the comic book industry: an indie comics darling.
With this recognition came additional work and opportunities, including the aforementioned New Yorker collab, a feature with New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), a 50-page comic based on the Cartoon Network series Adventure Time… and now, Nancy.
Taking up the challenge
For 90+ years, the spiky-haired Nancy has been a staple of newspaper funny pages. In 1933, cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller originally created the character for the comic strip Fritzi Ritz, as the orphaned niece of the titular flapper. Nancy and her friend Sluggo would then go on to steal the show. Within five years, what was intended as an incidental side character wrested control, and the strip was retitled Nancy in 1938.
The character’s tenacity would also outlive her creator. Upon Bushmiller’s death in 1982, the strip — currently distributed by Andrews McMeel Syndication — would continue through a legacy of creators. As Caitlin McGurk, curator at Columbus, Ohio’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, explains, “Nancy has stood the test of time, a credit to both the character’s universality and adaptability, and the boundless playground Bushmiller laid the groundwork for his characters to exist in. For over 90 years, the strip has evolved and devolved, depending on who was holding the pen. Nancy has been passed down through very different artists, each using her as an instrument of expression unique to themselves and their era.”
As of Jan. 1, 2026, Cash became the latest artist to wield the Nancy pen, following a lengthy run by cartoonist Olivia Jaimes, who helped to evolve the characters.
Cash said she saw the hand-off from Jaimes to be less disruptive for readers than when the latter initially took the reins.
“Olivia and I are both Bushmiller students,” she said. “My favorite Bushmiller strips are the offbeat and absurdist ones. I think I have a slightly different take on it than her, but we’re cut from the same cloth.”
It also helps that Cash stepped into Jaimes’s Nancy shoes once before.
“In 2024, I did three weeks of strips while Olivia was on sabbatical,” Cash said. “It was such a blast, and I told her, ‘Y’know, if you ever wanna go on another sabbatical, let me know, I’d love to fill in.’ ”
Those fill-in strips would go on to help Cash land the permanent gig.
“Like any other job, I interviewed, but it definitely didn’t look bad that I had already drawn three successful weeks of positively-reviewed Nancy strips. I also don’t think it looked bad that, in-between, I had won an Eisner.”
Cash is well aware of the legacy she’s now part of, using the debut strip of her 2026 run to pay respect to the various iterations of Nancy that came before her.
Now that she’s landed the regular gig, Cash is looking forward to making her own mark on the character.
“It’s a tough schedule; I’m drawing these strips every day! Olivia told me that after the first six months, it becomes second nature and gets a lot faster. I’m looking forward to that. Even though it’s hard, I’m having fun drawing my favorite comic strip.”
(And while Cash referring to Nancy as her “favorite” may sound like hyperbole, she has receipts, including a 7-year old Nancy tattoo and a short in the first PeePeePooPoo that explores a host of “Off-Brand Nancy” designs.)
As for the readers, McGurk, for one, is ready for it.
“I am eager to see how Caroline Cash will use the building blocks provided by Bushmiller to construct something of her own. A radical shift may be underway, as Nancy becomes imbued with a queer, punk sensibility that — perhaps — was always underneath her spiky hair to begin with.”
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