Sylvia began as a continuation of Hollander’s cartoons for a feminist magazine, The Spokeswoman, collected in her 1979 book of cartoons, I’m in Training to Be Tall and Blonde. The book's success led Field Enterprises to distribute Sylvia to newspapers as a daily comic strip beginning in 1981. Hollander has published 19 Sylvia collections, including The Whole Enchilada (1982), Tales from the Planet Sylvia (1990), with an introduction by Barbara Ehrenreich, and The Sylvia Chronicles: 30 Years of Graphic Misbehavior from Reagan to Obama (2010), with an introduction by Jules Feiffer.