Lady Bountiful's Anti-Mashing Brigade and Its First Victim

A six-panel Sunday comic tracking Lady Bountiful's scheme to protect young women from street harassment through an organized brigade of enforcers. The strip employs the visual conventions pioneered in 1890s newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, recurring characters rendered in caricature, and escalating physical comedy. The narrative unfolds across panels showing recruitment, training, and the brigade's first confrontation with an offending man. The artist uses exaggerated figure drawing and dense cross-hatching typical of early-twentieth-century comic illustration. This strip exemplifies how newspaper comics of the era packaged social commentary—here, public decorum and gender protection—within slapstick humor and character-driven situations that would become foundational to the emerging medium.