"My mother had a talent for friendship."

This is how Nicole Hollander starts the story of the birth of Sylvia, the reigning - and only - feminist of the comics pages. (Even in the '80s, when Sally Forth wore a business suit and tie, she was not a feminist.)

Sylvia enjoys spewing opinions as much as she enjoys a long drag on a cigarette.

Doing both can be bad for you, of course - which is why Hollander's Sylvia comic strip often ranks at the bottom in Palm Beach Post comics polls.

When editors tried to kill the strip from the comics page about a decade ago, however, a barrage of calls from middle-aged women saved Sylvia.

Perhaps Sylvia, too, has a talent for friendship.

Or at least a kinship with women who love cats, caffeine, bubble baths and politics. And we've got a lot of those in Palm Beach County.

Hollander recently chatted about Sylvia over coffee - a large cappucino, to be exact - at Starbucks in Lake Worth, where the artist has been snowbirding since February, when she came south to escape the Chicago winter.

Hollander looks nothing like Sylvia. She is petite and youthful at 72, with dramatic white hair and a smile as wide as Carol Channing's. And she's shy, she claims, but her irreverence is evident by the twinkle in her eye.

"I created Sylvia to say what I couldn't," she writes in her 2010 book, The Sylvia Chronicles: 30 Years of Graphic Misbehavior from Reagan to Obama.

She modeled the character after her mother, Shirley, and her mom's two friends Esther and Olga, who were housewives in the '40s.

When they'd gather for coffee, cigarettes and coffee cake, they'd cut loose with tart comments and backbiting that enthralled the young Nicole.

"These women were hilarious," Hollander says. "They did a lot of tap-dancing around men in those days. You know, if a man has a cold it's equal to you having the plague. My mother and her friends would talk about their husbands over coffee, and these fascinating, renegade parts of their personalities would come out."

Hollander took their sarcastic swagger and threw in a dose of feminist politics, and Sylvia was born. The strip, which has run in The Palm Beach Post for 20 years, once ran in 80 newspapers, but cutbacks in comics space have trimmed that number to about 30 today.

Sylvia's fans are "women 40 and up, usually career women, who have a love of words," Hollander says.

These women remember what typewriters and "White-Out" are. They are not above making fun of "the woman who does everything better than you" or "the woman who lies in her personal journal."

They like people who speak their minds, and they also tend to like Bill Clinton more than Newt Gingrich.

"Newt behaved like a pig and now he really looks like a pig," Hollander adds as an aside. She says his current wife, Calista, with her well-coiffed, stand-by-my-man image, fits the role of "transformational wife, the one who believes."

Hollander was a wife herself for just four years, when she was 20 and in college. "I'm not cut out for it," she says.

She ran into her ex-husband at a speaking engagement a few years ago. He told her: "I don't agree with your politics, but we can agree on cats."

Like Sylvia, Hollander adores cats. They symbolize the most self-involved part of our personalities, she says.

In the comic strip, the cats are often the wisest, wittiest commentators. They basically run the world.

"I taught myself to read, and then I sent away for catalogs," one cat deadpans in a strip from the '90s. "And then I ordered 50 pounds of smoked salmon from Harry & David."

Last week, the "feline protection squad" arrived to make sure the residents of the Sylvia strip were fit owners for the cats.

"Can there ever be too many cat cartoons?" Hollander writes in The Sylvia Chronicles. She creates cat-egories, such as "malicious cats with hypnotic powers."

A dog wants to please his owner, she says. "A cat will only come if there's something in it for her."

Cats are renegades. Nicole Hollander can relate.

Her latest business venture is a website, a depository for more comics and more commentary, called badgirlchats.com.

"It's not porno," Hollander cracks, sounding a little like Sylvia might. "It's for women who speak their mind.

"Bad girls tell the truth."