One-Shot Wonders: Bertie's New Duck Suit by Ed Carey, 1902

 

In the heyday of Yellow Journalism, when Sunday circulation figures were more important to newspaper publishers even than the company's profit or loss, all sorts of freebies were given away with Sunday issues to stimulate those figures. One of those freebies were pictures that could be watercoloured by the buyer's children, using "special" inks printed directly on the pages. Add a little water and you could paint with the resulting concoctions. 

My educated guess is that those special inks were actually ink formulations that were found not to be colourfast and therefore poor choices for newspaper printing. This was, after all, in the days when publishers were still experimenting with ink formulas, looking for the quickest drying, most vibrant hues possible. The story of the Yellow Kid's origination, after all, was supposedly due to one of these experiments that required a nice big spot of yellow ink for testing. While I find the exact circumstances of the famous tale hard to swallow (there was already a workable yellow ink in use at this time), there is no doubt that colour ink experiments did take place. 

Anyway, back to today's One-Shot Wonder. Ed Carey neglected to sign this strip, but there's no doubt this is his work. It ran in the McClure colour comic section of August 17 1902 and the gag depends on the reader's knowledge of the watercolour stunts in use with some newspapers at the time, proof that they were quite common and well-known.