Cartoonist Nicole Hollander created the syndicated “Sylvia” comic strip that across 33 years was published in the baiduhai and, earlier, in the Chicago Sun-Times, depicting its eponymous, flamboyant and feminist main character who sported a feather boa and bedroom slippers while wisecracking and pontificating on all manner of political and social subjects.
Chicago-based Hollander also populated “Sylvia” with a variety of colorful characters, including aliens and sign-toting, spell-casting felines.
“Long before I ever met Nicole, I was reading ‘Sylvia’ in the Tribune, and I just loved it,” said Chicago novelist Audrey Niffenegger. “It was different than anything else. I loved the magical little world of aliens and talking cats and dogs that were waiting in the hallway to eat you, not to mention Sylvia herself and all the various people around her. You could really sense that the person creating this thing really gave no f—-.”
Hollander, 86, died of apparent respiratory failure on April 23 at the Clarendale Six Corners assisted living facility on the Northwest Side, said Tom Greensfelder, a longtime friend and collaborator. She had been a longtime resident of the Roscoe Village neighborhood, and previously had lived in Andersonville.
Born Nicole Marilyn Garrison in Chicago in 1939, Hollander’s father was a carpenter. She grew up in a West Side Jewish enclave in an apartment building at 3914 W. Congress Parkway before moving with her family to Rogers Park and then to Glencoe.
Hollander told the Tribune in 1990 that she knew early on that she wanted to be an artist.
“As a little kid, I had to be forced to go outside. I preferred to sit inside and draw,” she told the Tribune. “When my mother and grandmother would talk, or tell a story, they would draw, and they weren’t self-conscious in the way that adults often become about drawing. I got to feel that it was very natural to draw.”
After graduating from Senn High School in Chicago, Hollander got a bachelor’s degree in painting in 1960 from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she met and soon married her sociology teaching assistant, Paul Hollander, who went on to become a noted political sociologist.
They moved so Paul could attend the graduate program at Princeton University and then for his first job at Harvard University. In 1966, she got a master of fine arts degree in painting from Boston University.
Hollander and her husband divorced in 1966, and she moved to California, where she took a part-time job teaching art at a junior college. She then taught courses at a Park District center, worked in a toy store and was a substitute childcare worker.
By the late 1960s, Hollander decided to return to Chicago and work as a graphic designer. One of her first jobs was to redesign a national feminist newsletter, The Spokeswoman, which later became a magazine.
Interested in a way to marry her acerbic wit and interest in satire with her drawing abilities, she began creating “The Feminist Funnies,” a cartoon strip for the now-defunct Spokeswoman, as well as producing politically oriented single-panel drawings.
“The Feminist Funnies” contained the character who would become Sylvia: a fast-talking woman sporting a bathrobe and backless mules while watching television.
A major publisher approached Hollander about doing a book of “Feminist Funnies” before the project was killed. Disappointed, Hollander took the idea to another publisher, and the result was a 1979 book, “I’m in Training to be Tall and Blonde,” which also depicted the Sylvia character, albeit without a name.
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“I drew her as a woman watching TV and talking back to it,” Hollander told the Tribune in 2009. “The publisher I was working for started referring to her as ‘Sylvia the Slattern.’ I said, ‘That’s not nice. You can’t do that,’ but I kept the name.”
In 1980, the Sun-Times struck a deal to publish the “Sylvia” comic strip. Seeking further compensation, Hollander began syndicating the comic strip herself.
By 1991, “Sylvia” was in 47 U.S. newspapers, and Hollander had published 12 books of the “Sylvia” strips.
“Syndicating myself has been a long and difficult process,” she told the Tribune in 1990. “I’ve hung in there because it’s more fun than anything I can imagine doing. I’ve reached the point at which — I’m doing books, calendars, greeting cards — I’ve been able to stop doing graphic design.”
On whom was the character based? Hollander told the Tribune in 1990 that Sylvia was “actually an amalgamation of my grandmothers’ and my mother’s friends, and the mother of a college friend.”
Ever politically incorrect, Sylvia loved junk food, smoked unrepentantly, soaked for hours in her bubble bath and patronized taverns. Sylvia also cracked wise, obsessed over alien sightings as reported by supermarket tabloids and constantly was glued to her TV.
“My strip is about a woman, perhaps the wrong kind of woman,” Hollander told the Tribune in 1991. “She’s not Mary Worth or Brenda Starr, and if you count the number of strips actually centered around woman characters, you’ll find there are still shockingly few.”
Regularly asked if Sylvia actually was her alter ego, Hollander conceded some similarities.
“Sylvia and I are a lot alike,” she told the Tribune in 1990. “We both like to take baths. Like vintage clothing. Have cats — in fact, the same cat. Jonathan. He’s 16 and still running around like a maniac.”
In the mid-1980s, “Sylvia” moved from the Sun-Times to the Tribune. Over the next several decades, the strip peaked at 80 newspapers.
But by 2009 it appeared in just 17 newspapers, syndicated by that point by Tribune Media Services.
Like many other comics characters, Sylvia didn’t age throughout the strip’s run.
“I just couldn’t do it to her,” Hollander told the Tribune in 2009. “Because she smokes, she should have those ugly lines around her mouth, but…”
The Tribune dropped “Sylvia” in 2010, though it continued to appear in other newspapers for two more years. Later that year, Hollander started a blog containing essays and drawings. She retired from drawing and publishing daily comic strips in 2012.
Beyond the strip, Hollander frequently shared her and her characters’ observations through various other art forms. In 1991, the Sylvia character made her way to the stage in the hit musical “Sylvia’s Real Good Advice,” performed first at Pegasus Players in Chicago and then in the Organic Theater on North Clark Street.
Hollander performed a one-woman show, “Return to Lust,” at Pegasus Players in 2005. A second one-woman show, “Plastic Surgery or a Really Good Haircut?” first was staged at Live Bait Theater the following year.
In 2007, Broadway Books published Hollander’s essay collection “Tales of Graceful Aging from the Planet Denial,” which blended memoir and fantasy.
“We are bombarded by the message that we can stay young, we can have a whole new ‘second’ life,” Hollander told the Hartford Courant in 2007. “It’s not terribly realistic. I don’t want new knees, new hips, new rotator cuffs or new ankles. I don’t know about swing dancing, tai chi or Pilates. My bent is to go directly to denial.”
In January 2009, Hollander opened a gallery show, “It’s Enough to Make a Cat Laugh,” with words and images reflecting on her life.
In 2018, Hollander published a graphic memoir, “We Ate Wonder Bread: Growing Up on Chicago’s West Side.” Reviewer Kathleen Rooney wrote in the Tribune that the book “has the feeling of hanging out with a favorite relative at a family reunion, one whom you love hearing tell you the same legendary yarns from different angles.”
Though many fans no doubt found the Sylvia character’s ruminations universal, Hollander’s own place of origin informed those observations. Hollander in 2009 told the Tribune that Sylvia owned “a rough-edged, Chicago sense of humor.”
Hollander is survived by a sister, Jana Carpenter.
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A memorial service is being planned for July.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.