Four Color Comics

Four Color
One of the earlier issues of Four Color (#9 from October 1942), featuring Walt Disney's Donald Duck in Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold. Note Four Color title below the price.
Publication information
Publisher	Dell Comics
Schedule	Various
Format	Ongoing series
Publication date	September 1939 – June 1968
Number of issues	approximately 1350

Four Color, also known as Four Color Comics and One Shots, was a long-running American comic book anthology series published by Dell Comics between 1939 and 1968. The title is a reference to the four basic colors used when printing comic books (cyan, magenta, yellow and black at the time).

More than 1,000 issues were published, usually with multiple titles released every month. An exact accounting of the actual number of unique issues produced is difficult because occasional issue numbers were skipped and a number of reprint issues were also included. Nonetheless, the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide lists well over 1,000 individual issues, ending with #1354. It currently holds the record for most issues produced of an American comic book; its nearest rivals, Action Comics and Detective Comics, ended their initial runs in 2011 at 904 issues and 881 issues, respectively. The first 25 issues are known as "series 1"; after they were published, the numbering began again and "series 2" began. Four Color published many of the first comics featuring characters licensed from Walt Disney.

Unlike most comic book series of the day, which were either devoted to one character, or were anthologies with collections of stories starring the cartoon characters of a particular studio, Four Color instead devoted each individual issue to different characters. One issue might feature a popular cartoon character, while the next might be an adaptation of a popular movie or TV series. Thus the phrase "one shot" which was used in the publisher's code in the first interior page of the first story. For example issue 223 (1949) was denoted DDOS 223 which translates as Donald Duck One-Shot #223. Most Four Color titles featured licensed properties; relatively few original characters were created for the line. The first Four Color comic featured comic strip and movie serial hero Dick Tracy; the last (issue number 1,354, series 2) was based upon the TV series Calvin and the Colonel.