Carol Lay (born 1952) is an American alternative cartoonist best known for her weekly comic strip, Story Minute (later to evolve into the strip Way Lay), which ran for almost 20 years in such US papers as the LA Weekly, the NY Press, and on Salon.

Based in Los Angeles, Lay's strips and illustrations have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Mad, Newsweek, Worth Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker.

[3] Lay's work, including "Story Minute" appeared in alternative newsweeklies during the 1990s.

She is the author of Mythos, a prose novel featuring Wonder Woman (DC/Pocket Books, 2003),[4] Goodnight, Irene: The Collected Stories of Irene Van de Kamp (Last Gasp, 2007), and The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude, a Memoir (Villard, 2008).

On January 26, 2015, Carol Lay's Lay Lines page began on GoComics with a week-long serialization of her story "The Thing Under the Futon" (January 26–30, 2015), followed by serializations of "Now, Endsville" (February 3–10, 2015) and "Invisible City" (April 12–June 26, 2015).