A fellow named Bernard Duggan writes to ask…
Hi! I read your post about Don't Give Up The Ship and saw that there is a Dell Comic adaptation. Could you tell me more about the Dell Four-Color series? How many issues were there? Was it a monthly series? What were the best issues? Did Dell ever make a Herbie the Love Bug comic? Thanks for your time!
Ah, Dell Four-Color…the series specifically designed to make comic book indexers remove large clumps of hair from their heads. Well, the easiest explanation for it is that Dell put out a lot of comics, many of which were either one-shot publications or part of a kind of "test" situation where they'd put out an issue of something and then, nine months later, put out another issue…and then, maybe a year or three later, put out yet another. For distribution reasons that I can't begin to comprehend let alone explain, they decided to number all of these miscellaneous titles as almost-sequential numbers of an irregularly-released series that was known, mainly internally, as Dell Four-Color. Most did not carry that name anywhere but there would be a little number on the first page of art that said, "O.S. 229" or whatever. (That particular number appeared on an issue of Smokey Stover. It did not mean that there had been 228 prior issues of Smokey Stover. It just meant that it was #229 in the Four-Color series.)
The first Four-Color issue appears to have been an issue of Dick Tracy in 1939, which was followed by an issue of Don Winslow of the Navy. They numbered up to #25 (an issue of Popeye), then started numbering over again with a 1942 issue of Little Joe. This numbering continued until 1962 and the last was probably #1354, which featured Calvin and the Colonel. One cannot be absolutely positive about this because they occasionally skipped numbers or even released them out of numerical sequence. Last I heard, for instance, no one had ever reported any sighting of #1351 through #1353. Don't Give Up The Ship was #1049.
To make matters more complicated, a lot of comics that appeared in the Four-Color series later spun off into their own bi-monthly or quarterly books, and the numbering sometimes retro-actively counted Four-Color issues. The first Uncle Scrooge comic was #386, the second was #456 and the third was #495. When they decided to then launch a regular Uncle Scrooge comic, they started with #4 and continued from there. In some cases, they didn't count accurately. Woody Woodpecker, for instance, appeared in 16 Four-Color editions, then started his own comic with Woody Woodpecker #16, not 17.
They were not monthly. They were not put out in any discernible pattern or frequency. Four or five non-sequential issues might come out one day, then nothing for a month. As for what were the best issues, that would depend on your tastes. I suspect most folks might name the many issues done by Carl Barks, Walt Kelly or Alex Toth but I liked a wide range of them.
All of these were done as part of a partnership arrangement that Dell Comics had with Western Publishing (aka Western Printing and Lithography). If you're interested in how that worked, you ought to read this piece that I wrote to answer the Incessantly-Asked Question about that. By the time the movie of The Love Bug came out, Western was issuing all Disney-based comics without any Dell involvement. They put out a one-shot, unnumbered adaptation of that film in 1969 and also did the sequel — both drawn magnificently by Dan Spiegle. Same guy who drew the comic of Don't Give Up The Ship. They're really stunning books, as Dan had to draw that Volkswagen about a hundred times in each and, despite having only one piece of photo reference from one view, he somehow managed to breathe life into his drawings of a faceless car and to depict it from every conceivable angle. (To see another incredible Spiegle-drawn movie adaptation, seek out the 1963 Gold Key version of Mutiny on the Bounty. Absolutely amazing.)