Militant Mary

This daily strip by Steve Hyde features Mary, a pugilistic young woman in aviator gear, boasting of her fighting prowess. The single panel uses a speech balloon to deliver her monologue—a formal device popularized in newspaper comics of the 1910s. Mary's exaggerated physique and aggressive posture, paired with the absurdist humor of her threat to strike boxer Jack Johnson, exemplify the slapstick sensibility of early comic strips. The work appears during the boom of recurring character strips in American newspapers, when artists were establishing visual conventions—expressive line work, dynamic poses, and integrated text—that would define the medium for decades.