Regardless of the exact ending number, it's far and away the current record-holder for most number of issues of a North American title. Some 1375 issues were released in just 20 years.

One Shot
Four Color is also confusingly known by a second name, "One Shot", which was apparently its in-house name. This is evidenced by the fact that Dell assigned the work job numbers with the prefix "OS".

Still, the use of the term "one shot", given the nature of the book, is inconsistent with the way that DC and Marvel, for instance, would use the term. Though there a number of issues that are genuine one-shots in most modern senses, there are equally a number of characters (like Uncle Scrooge, The Three Stooges, Brett Maverick, Little Lulu and Gyro Gearloose) who make multiple appearances over the years.

And the series is the point of origin of a number of different solo titles. Dell's title continuity took on two forms with respect to characters who debuted in Four Color. Sometimes they started the resulting solo title with a #1. But often they took the number of appearances in Four Color into account when launching a new series. For instance, Dell's numbering of its Uncle Scrooge solo title begins at #4, in deference to the fact that three issues of Four Color predate it.

Thus, to help in understanding the relationship between Four Color issues and solo titles, we will title each issue of this series with the name of the property and a number to indicate the number of the appearance of that property in Four Color.

These issue titles are thus "unofficial", but useful.

The indicia title of any given issue usually makes no reference to Four Color at all, but is instead the cover title followed by the Four Color number. Thus, issue #607 bears the indicia title of Santa Claus Funnies #607.

Issue variants
Many issues of this series actually had two versions. Unlike modern comics with multiple versions, though, the difference is usually seen most clearly on the back cover, not the front. Some printings of a particular issue had a full page advertisement on the back, while others had an additional one-page comic strip on the back.

Cover dating
It is not uncommon in this series to find more than one issue for a given cover date. Also, the series had a highly variable cover-dating "system". For instance, there are no fewer than eight different issues with a cover date of "Apr-June 1962". All of these have a lower issue number than the issue cover dated "January 1962". And there's at least one issue, known to have been released in 1962, which bears no cover date at all.

Number of issues cataloged: 468