Hometown Paper Profiles Caroline Cash, New Nancy Cartoonist
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Caroline Cash is getting some press after taking on the Nancy comic strip this year. The latest is her old hometown alternative newspaper the Charleston City Paper where cartoonist Steve Stegelin profiles Cash.
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
Read the Caroline Cash profile here or through Issuu.
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