Features

What happens when two expert female humorists get together and collaborate? Hilarity!  

Sylvia comic strip creator Nicole Hollander, and columnist Regina Barreca, have put their pretty little feminist heads together and written The ABC of Vice: An Insatiable Women’s Guide, Alphabetized, (Bibliopola Press/$10.95). This half-cartoon, half-text sassy, slim paperback covers the important issues of life, dishing dirt on topics such as: Adultery (“When involved in adultery, women will often get parts of their bodies waxed more often than they vacuum the rug.”); bras (“Cute bras look cute as long as they do not actually touch your person.”); penis envy (“Isn’t it a good thing… that it isn’t on his face?”); and youth (“As you grow older you are never tempted to buy orange lipstick no matter what the magazine writers say.”).  

In town to promote The ABC of Vice and visit with friends, Hollander gave a reading at Black Oak Books, dined at two of her favorite restaurants, Saul’s and Chez Panisse, and indulged in one of her obsessive-compulsive passions: buying shoes at Rabat on Fourth Street.  

A Chicago native and resident, Hollander spends about six weeks a year in Berkeley, seeking shelter from the miserably cold Midwest winters. “Chicago in February is terrible,” she says. “After working all morning, I love to walk down to Shattuck Avenue for a treat at noon. The gardens here are wonderful and the plants are enormous, not like the little things we have in Chicago. Everything smells good.” 

Her love affair with the East Bay began in 1966, when, after a divorce, she moved to Berkeley, learned how to drive, and taught art perspective at Laney College. She also subbed at a day care center, clerked at a toy store and was an art instructor at Live Oak Park Recreation Center.  

Hollander attended the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and graduated with a Master’s Degree in Fine Art from Boston University. She had no intention of becoming a cartoonist, but while working as a graphic designer (one of her assignments was to create matchbox covers), she participated in the re-design of a feminist magazine. “I started doing illustrations and it turned into a comic strip… It was the atmosphere at the time that helped my work evolve. I didn’t want to be a cartoon artist, I wanted to be a great painter.” 

But 22 years and more than 20 books, calendars, day planners, and a variety of t-shirts and coffee mugs later, Hollander and her alter-ego, Sylvia, are still taking on the political issues of the day and the daily grind of womanhood. Hollander transforms news and events into a feisty, dynamic strip that is distributed to more than 80 newspapers around the country, including the Daily Planet. On her website, www.nicolehollander.com, Hollander has said of her life’s work, “On one hand, I have one of the best careers in the world: a chance to mouth off about everything and draw while I am in my pajamas. . .on the other hand, having to come up with a strip six days a week every week with no vacation, there is always the possibility that I won’t come up with an idea.”  

But it’s obvious from Hollander’s smile, laughter and prolific output that she doesn’t really have any trouble with inspiration, and that she loves what she does. As she and Barreca say in The ABC of Vice under the letter U for Unconditional Love: “Even unconditional love has conditions.”