A variety of female characters have been featured in comics over the years—superheroes like Wonder Woman, teenagers like Betty and Veronica, good girls and bad girls in romance stories, even career gals—but I’m not sure there’s ever been a female character like Sylvia. So I’m going to quote the Bard of Avon and pose a rhetorical question: Who is Sylvia?

 

Sylvia is the creation of Nicole Hollander, who’s been publishing Sylvia strips since 1976 and is still going strong despite recently being dropped by her hometown Chicago Tribune (ouch!). Sylvia is somewhere between forty and death, to quote Jerry Herman, and lives with her daughter Rita in a city apartment (what city? We never find out). She is most often seen at her typewriter (Sylvia seems to support herself as a writer although exactly how is not articulated), talking back to the news media, or recovering from the inanities of the media and our public officials with a nice soak in a bubble bath. Most importantly, Sylvia is completely comfortable in her own skin, has her bullshit detector perpetually set on high and is monumentally unconcerned with any need to conform to social expectations.

 

In other words Sylvia is the exact opposite of the perpetually insecure Cathy from the strip by the same name drawn by Cathy Guisewite—a character and strip whose appeal escapes me entirely.

 

I started reading Sylvia in the early 1980s, when she was considered something of a feminist icon. Her closest relative in the comics might be Mo from Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For, except that Sylvia enjoys life more and is not, as far as we know, a dyke. Her willingness to point out the absurdities of news coverage and politicians’ thought processes also reminds me of the David Rees comic Get Your War On and, like Rees, Hollander concentrates far more on the dialogue of her characters than on the art. This approach works well for Sylvia because the characters mostly sit and talk to each other or directly address the reader—and besides, I’m impressed that Hollander is willing to confide that she has been known to photocopy her characters to avoid redrawing them. Now that’s a secure cartoonist!

 

If you missed Sylvia the first time around, you can catch up now with the collection The Sylvia Chronicles: 30 Years of Graphic Misbehavior from Reagan to Obama,which includes commentary by Hollander. It offers a little tour through the last 30 years of American politics and what will amaze you the most is that however much things change, they also seem to stay the same.

 

Sylvia is fond of creative answering machine messages. Here’s an example from the years of the first President Bush (who vomited on the Japanese Prime Minister during a formal dinner in 1992):

 

Hi, this is Sylvia’s Sound-Off Hotline. If you’re calling to rant about how the president’s suggestion that we resolve our health care crisis by choosing healthy lifestyles is the solution of a guy who couldn’t lose his insurance coverage if he upchucked six more times on camera, forget it. At the sound of the beep, invite me out to dinner.

 

So remind me again, when are we going to get national health? Not in my lifetime, I suspect.

 

Sylvia is also fond of quizzing her fans. Remember Colleen Rowley, the FBI Agent who broke the code of silence to detail how the FBI had mishandled information related to the 9-11 attacks? Here’s Sylvia’s quiz on the topic:

 

Are you an optimist or a pessimist? What do you think lies ahead for Colleen Rowley?

        1. She’ll be appointed head of the FBI.

        2. She’ll receive a medal and a parade from a grateful nation.

        3. She’ll never work again.

 

In fact none of these occurred, but #3 came the closest: Rowley retired in 2004 without so much as a promotion for her efforts.

 

There are a variety of other characters in Sylvia, including a sardonic cat who takes after her owner, the Bad Girls (younger versions of Sylvia who aren’t taking nothing from nobody), the Love Cop (“Flying Hither and yon trying to keep unsuitable couples apart”), The Woman Who Does Everything More Beautifully Than You (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Martha Stewart) and more. They’re all a hoot and have aged beautifully as well.

 

But don’t take my word for it: no less an eminence than Jules Feiffer, who wrote the foreword to this volume, says that “For thirty years Sylvia has been a witty, sardonic, on-target witness and commentator of our culture, our politics, our relationships (with Mom, men, cats, you name it): all that stuff that controls our daily lives, and enmeshes us in our nation-wide psychosis of consensual powerlessness.”

 

You can see an example of the art from Sylvia at Hollander's entry in the Lambiek Comiclopedia. The Sylvia Chronicles will be officially released on August 3, 2010 and may currently be ordered online from The New Press or from amazon.com. | Sarah Boslaugh