Militant Mary

This single-panel comic features a young woman with distinctive pigtails addressing the reader directly. The humor rests on contradiction: she claims to dislike fair play, yet demonstrates it constantly—even managing to "whale" a child with a "righteous glow." The strip exemplifies the early newspaper comic's reliance on exaggerated character types and moral paradox. By 1913, recurring characters like this one populated the Sunday pages, establishing visual conventions—speech balloons, bold linework, simplified anatomy—that would define the emerging medium. The direct address to readers was common in single-panel strips of the era, before multi-panel narrative became dominant.