Nicole Hollander, Creator of Sylvia

On first glance, Sylvia appears to be a coarse comic strip. The art seems simplistic, with drawings of characters starkly contrasted in severe black and white. The backgrounds appear to be cluttered with stuff, large and small. In a majority of panels, there are lines and lines of words covering any white space left over. It is initially difficult to focus on the message that the cartoonist is attempting to make.

But it is worth a try. Sylvia, created by cartoonist Nicole Hollander, takes on the political issues of the day and the daily grind that women face with a jab of sarcasm and a big poke of fun. The star of the comic strip is the sharp-witted feminist Sylvia, who has a lot of entertaining things to say about the state of the world from her position at her old-fashioned typewriter... or from her comfortable reclining soak in the bathtub. The character is most often drawn on profile: a big woman with big hair, a big nose and a big, shining smile.

Hollander derives her humour from the media, transforming news and events into an entertaining comic strip. To the mix, Hollander added eccentric friends and quirky family members, each sketched in a one-dimensional manner. While the drawing at first seems raw and undeveloped, closer examination shows Hollander's skill and individual style. All that clutter in the background is quickly-detailed line work: typewriter, books, television, cups and dishes, plants, pictures, fish, pets... and the list goes on. It could look a lot like home. Maybe just like your desk at work.

One set of characters in the comic strip play a predominant role, perhaps occasionally even more than Sylvia. Hollander created a pair of sassy male cats, again drawn flat with minimal expression - a lot like real cats that just sit there and stare intently at their humans. The charming felines hold up dialogue signs in answer to their owner's questions and most often produce gales of laughter from their responses. A series of strips end each installment with one of the cats massaging his owner's angry head after the cat has "saved" his mistress from some perceived danger. "She'll thank me for it later, when she's calm again," the cat says. Hollander has handily spun the popular felines into many successful books, some of which include "My Cat's Not Fat, He's Just Big Boned," published 1998, Hyperion/Source Books, and the latest, "Everything Here is Mine: An Unhelpful Guide to Cat Behaviour," published 2000, also by Hyperion/Source. Cat lovers are thrilled.

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