Militant Mary

A single-panel comic featuring a young woman proudly displaying her Easter bonnet—an elaborate creation festooned with feathers and ornament. Her declaration that the hat is "a DREAM" meets swift contradiction: jealous friends call it "MERCY, WHAT A SCREAM!" The strip exemplifies the visual language developed in early newspaper comics: a centered figure, speech balloons anchoring character voice, and exaggerated facial features conveying emotion. By 1914, such daily and Sunday strips had become the training ground for what would evolve into comic books, establishing recurring characters, humorous situations, and the panel-based narrative structure that defines the medium.