Militant Mary

This single-panel strip by Steve Hyde presents a character in domestic revolt. Mary, armed with a broom, imagines dust motes as men—a visual pun that transforms housework into mock combat. The joke plays on the era's suffrage debates by literalizing female militancy within the home. The cartoon employs the speech balloon convention and exaggerated figure drawing typical of early newspaper comics, where domestic humor and contemporary politics frequently collided. Such strips appeared in the Sunday pages and dailies that established the visual language of sequential narrative and character-driven comedy that would define the comic strip medium.