Militant Mary

A single-panel comic by Steve Hyde featuring a round-faced woman in glasses and bow-tie, hands on hips in confrontational stance. The character declares she may not represent the type for whom men die or fight, but insists that if all women possessed her qualities, they'd have voting rights. The strip exemplifies early 20th-century newspaper comics' embrace of topical humor tied to contemporary political movements. Simple line work and direct address to the reader characterize the visual approach of this era's dailies, where cartoonists deployed recurring characters to comment on social debates, establishing conventions—speech balloons, expressive body language, direct address—that would define the emerging comic book medium.