Militant Mary

This Sunday newspaper strip by Steve Hyde features a female character in military uniform, armed and ready for combat. The single-panel gag relies on visual wordplay: if Uncle Sam recruited women soldiers, he would "never have a foe." The strip exemplifies early comic strip humor that combined recurring character types with topical references—here, the suffrage movement and debates over women's military service. Published during the Great War, *Militant Mary* employs the visual conventions that newspaper comics had established: a framed narrative space, bold lettering for dialogue, and exaggerated figure drawing. Such Sunday pages helped define sequential art's visual language before comic books emerged as a distinct format in the 1930s.