Caroline Cash

Cash was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and raised in Mount Pleasant. She attended the Charleston County School of the Arts before enrolling at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she received a BFA in 2019.^[2][3]

While at SAIC, she began self-publishing comics and participating in small-press and zine festivals.^[3]

Cash first gained attention with her early comics, including Girl in the World (2019), published by Silver Sprocket. She is best known for her ongoing autobiographical comic series PeePee PooPoo, a self-contained anthology that has received critical attention and major industry awards. The series won the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Minicomic and the Eisner Award for Best Limited Series.

In 2025, Cash wrote and illustrated Adventure Time: The Bubbline College Special for Oni Press.^[4]

After contributing as a guest cartoonist to Nancy in 2024, Cash became the strip's full-time cartoonist beginning January 1, 2026,^[5][2] succeeding Olivia Jaimes.^[2] Cash described the opportunity as "a real dream come true," adding that Nancy had long been her favorite comic strip.^[6] Cash has said that her approach to Nancy draws on the "offbeat and absurdist" qualities of Ernie Bushmiller's original strips, while maintaining continuity with the modern sensibility introduced by Olivia Jaimes.^[2]

Cash's work is associated with the tradition of small-press, autobiographical comics. Critics have noted that her work "remains rooted in the tradition of 1990s autobiographical one-(wo)man anthologies,"^[7] and also highlight her use of deliberately crude or "puerile" humor as a stylistic device, transforming it into more personal or reflective material — thereby engaging with the playful, anti-formalist traditions of underground comix.^[8]

Her PeePee PooPoo series combines autobiographical material with humor, often drawing on everyday life, relationships, and experiences within queer and urban communities. The series initially circulated as a self-published minicomic before being taken up by Silver Sprocket in 2023. (PeePee PooPoo is noted for its unconventional numbering system. Rather than following a linear sequence, individual issues have been released with humorous or non-sequential numbers [such as #69, #420, and #80085].^[9] Publisher Silver Sprocket has acknowledged this non-linear structure, noting that multiple issues preceded its release of PeePee PooPoo #1 in 2024.)^[10]

Cash frequently employs cover pastiches in PeePee PooPoo as a form of homage to earlier alternative and underground comics. A review in The Comics Journal described the cover of issue #420 as a "note-perfect" evocation of Daniel Clowes' Eightball, while noting that a previous issue featured a "dead-on" pastiche of R. Crumb's work.^[11]

In interviews, Cash has emphasized a largely intuitive creative process, describing her hand-drawn, hand-lettered process as rooted in making "comics that [she] cared about," rather than targeting a specific audience.^[5]

Cash has described herself as gay,^[4] and her work as "outwardly queer," reflecting her own identity.^[12] She recalls her experiences as "a gay teenager"^[4] in discussing her influences.^[13]

Cash was based in Chicago during her early career and later relocated to Philadelphia, where she is currently living.^[2]

• 2024 Eisner Award — Best Limited Series or Story Arc (PeePee PooPoo)^[14]
• 2023 Broken Frontier Award — Best Periodical (PeePee PooPoo)^[15]
• 2022 Ignatz Award — Outstanding Minicomic (PeePee PooPoo)^[16]