Four Color (1942, Dell)

Four Color ran for 1332 issues (1942–1962). Publishing format: was ongoing series. Dell usually published multiple issues of this series per month, with different features in each issue. As a series, it was held together mostly by its numbering--only the early 1940s issues carried the continuing title "Four Color"; preceding and successive issues changed titles every issue to match their contents. By convention, the entire series is referred to as "Four Color" or "Four Color comics". For unknown reasons Dell restarted the numbering on the Series in 1942, leading fans to refer to the "first series" and "second series" or "Series I" (see Four Color (Dell, 1939 series)) and "Series II" (this series). Early issues have "Four Color Comic" on the cover. Last with this notation is #101. Because it was a series of one-shots, rather than a periodical, it didn't print publication dates on its covers or indicia until mid-1951. The concept of "pull-date" was not really relevant to those issues. There were features that appeared in multiple issues, but usually not on a regular recurring basis such as bi-monthly or quarterly. What many issues did have lettered on the first page was a story code, with a year and month signifier. For example, story code of "F.T.P #113-467" referred to 1946 July. The copyright registration publication dates (on-sale dates) correlate strongly with the dates from the story codes; in this example the on-sale date was 1946-06-14. Therefore we use the date from the story code as the publication date, without brackets "July 1946". For issues without a story code but with a copyright date, we use the date of other issues published at approximately the same time to determine a publication date, which is listed within brackets. For example, #128 included no story code, but #129 sold on the same date did have one. We list #128 as "[December] 1946" and #129 as "December 1946". The following issues were apparently never published: 1217, 1228, 1277, 1292, 1314-1327, 1329, 1331, 1334, 1338-1340, 1342-1347, 1351-1353. There are advertisement and non-advertisement versions for many issues from #693 to the end. There are UK price variants issues 1087 thru 1236.