Girl in the World by Caroline Cash

Caroline Cash took over the Nancy comic strip at the beginning of this year, after a try-out run (before and after a couple of other creators) a year before. Her predecessor was Olivia Jaimes, a female creator who rejuvenated the strip in 2018 and is shrouded in mystery. Well, slightly more mystery than any other name on a national media entity where you never see the human being behind it - she's pseudonymous and has guarded her privacy, though the assumption is she's also known as a cartoonist under her real name, whatever that is. [1]

I liked the Jaimes Nancy; so far (it's January 31 as I write this) I'm liking the Cash Nancy; and I liked Cash's brief run in 2024. So I figured I should see what else Cash has done. She was best-known, pre-Nancy, for her ongoing comic PeePee PooPoo, with a confusing numbering scheme that has so far gone 420, 69, 80085, and 1. (I may have the order wrong, for obvious reasons.) Before that, though, she had a standalone graphic novel, Girl in the World, as her comics debut in 2019. So I took a look at that.

Girl follows a large cast, almost all female - there's one gay man I remember, and possibly other men in minor roles as passers-by, but it's a story about a lose friend group of women, during one long night. (Yes, there is a Bechdel Test reference at the end.) They're all young, and I guess to complete the cliché I should say they're all restless, too. They're all part of the same set in whatever city this is - Cash herself is from Chicago, but the city here is unnamed but mostly low-rise, rowhouses and buses and dark late-night streets.

These girls - I guess I should call them girls, from the title? - have different things they can do this night: the organized ones are Facebook events, to make this even more 2019, but the characters mostly ditch organized frivolity early and spend their time traveling with each other to the next thing, talking and just hanging out.

There's no larger plot: this is a book about those conversations, about what this group of young women are thinking about and worried about and unhappy about in this random night in 2019. They're different people - Cash does, I think, give them all names and personalities, but the names don't get used much, as friends don't dialogue-tag each other all that often.

Cash's art style shifts and alters - at first I thought she was creating looks for each cluster of characters, but I think, in the end, it's more a new creator working on her first long work - trying new things, using all of the tools she has, pushing in every direction she can, using each new blank page to learn something new.

Girl is a very "indy" book - that art style, that kind of storytelling, that feeling of a young creator trying things out in public. I find that kind of work energizing, and this is a great example of the type.

[1] I would love to work up a conspiracy that Cash is actually Jaimes, and this is a complicated double-fakeout to go public and switch her art style. But Cash is barely thirty, and I think was still in art school when "Jaimes" took over Nancy, so the timeline really doesn't work. Sad, because that would be an awesome thing to at least pretend to believe in.