Remembering Cartooning Goddess Nicole Hollander (1939-2026)
Posted on May 5, 2026
by Eric P
When Nicole Hollander, whose death at the age of 86 was only recently publicly announced, started cartooning in the 1970s, the field was still largely a male-dominated art form. At the time there was her and Cathy Guisewite and that was pretty much it – and Cathy was in way more newspapers.
Hollander’s comics echoed the counterculture work of Jules Feiffer in a few ways – they were loose and scrawly in their visual style; they delivered satirical social commentary through the highly personal concerns of finely drawn (and chronically wordy) individual characters; and they were unambiguously for grownup audiences who were more likely to want to read about politics, gender, and assorted neuroses than about, you know, cats and lasagna. (Admittedly, Hollander’s punchlines did include cats.)
Hollander’s comic strip Sylvia was syndicated by Tribune Media Services in 1980 continuing to entertain readers daily and even spawning a couple of stage musicals. But the newspapers that carried Sylvia – never a blockbuster number to begin with, owing to Hollander’s brazen and uncompromising sensibilities – dwindled over time, and nowadays even the various published collections of her strips can be hard to come by. But without her groundbreaking influence and example, the world likely would never have seen the emergence of major comics figures like Alison Bechdel.
Celebrate her life by taking a particularly loquacious bubble bath.
We Ate Wonder Bread
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