Militant Mary

A single-panel gag strip by Steve Hyde featuring a pugilistic young woman in glasses and short dress, armed with a rifle. The humor rests on her deadpan declaration that when struck, she'll simply turn the other cheek—"merely so to speak"—before retaliating. The strip exemplifies the fast-gag newspaper comic format that dominated the 1910s, where recurring character types (the scrappy girl, the boxer, the misfit) generated quick one-liners tied to topical interests. Here, physical comedy and the suffragist-era "New Woman" collide in a format that would seed the visual and narrative conventions of the comic book: panel borders, speech balloons, and character-driven comedy that newspapers serialized daily.