So if we know that the story is a meet-cute story, that allows Cash to focus on how we move through this story.
Adventure Time: The Bubbline College Special by Caroline Cash (Oni Press, 2025)
Maybe it’s weird to say but we just don’t get enough nice, small, intimate stories. Or perhaps it’s just that we’re not reading the right books. Caroline Cash lets us get lost in Adventure Time: The Bubbline College Special. This story is an alternate universe story to an established property but don’t let that scare you off— you don’t need to really know anything about Adventure Time to be able to be enthralled by Cash’s story about stepping outside of the world you know (i.e. in this case heading off to college) to discover that the world is a bit bigger and more special than you thought it was. Cash pushes us to identify with these characters while we learn that there’s more to our lives than what we’ve been brought up to believe about them.
Getting dropped off at college for the first time, Princess Bubbline tries to be the perfect student. Cash does a great job in the first few pages of showing us who Bubbline is as she has to deal with being dropped off by a parental figure (in this case, a butler who’s a bow-tie wearing peppermint (remember, this is still Adventure Time,) dealing with an inconsiderate new roommate who uses Bubbline’s toothbrush to clean their room, and Marceline, the “bad girl” who gets set up to be the adversary for our sweet Bubbline. Cash never has Bubbline come out and just tell us what Bubbline is feeling when dealing with these people; Cash wonderfully uses a few marks to draw Bubbline’s reactions to them. She expresses joy, frustration, resignation, and joy in her cartooning so it’s easy to get lost in this story without feeling like Cash is having to pull us into it.
It’s easy to get lost in this tale of discovery because Cash makes it so much fun to get swept up into it. Even her letting is fun and bouncy. So as we get to know Bubbline and Marceline (it’s really their story with plenty of other Adventure Time characters showing up in supporting roles) and even see a relationship develop. There’s nothing necessarily groundbreaking here— it’s basically a meet-cute story where the two appear to despise each other because of their differences. So you know where it’s going fairly early. So if we know what the story is, that allows Cash to focus on how we get move this story.
If you’ve read Cash’s Pee Pee Poo Poo, this is basically a story out of her one-person anthology but just with some of the rawness and cynicism smoothed out. That doesn’t mean it’s a watered-down Cash story as she still tells the story of a young woman navigating the world. Cash gets to be sweet, innocent, defiant, queer, and celebratory in this story. It’s not too hard to see that the cartoonist who does Pee Pee Poo Poo is very much still present here, able to tell an alternate universe story (don’t call it fanfic) that it feels only she could do. This may be an Adventure Time story but it’s very much a Caroline Cash story as well.
Every now and then, you just need a nice and sweet story to help you get through everything else.
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