Four Color #1040
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeFour Color #1040 is the first comic book appearance of Quick Draw McGraw and his sidekick Baba Looey — Hanna-Barbera characters who debuted on television just weeks earlier and went on to become cornerstones of the studio's Silver Age output. Dell used the Four Color umbrella as a try-out platform for licensed TV properties, and this issue's success launched an ongoing Quick Draw McGraw series that ran through 1962. The comic arrived at the peak of the late-1950s Western craze that Quick Draw was explicitly designed to parody, making it a small but telling artifact of how mid-century animation and comics licensing fed each other. It also preserves the earliest print incarnation of Snooper and Blabber, a backup cat-and-mouse detective duo who originated on the same TV program.
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The Quick Draw McGraw Show premiered in syndication on September 28, 1959 — Hanna-Barbera's third television series, following Ruff & Reddy and The Huckleberry Hound Show — sponsored by Kellogg's and distributed by Screen Gems. Dell's Western Publishing arm moved quickly to capitalize on the new property, issuing Four Color #1040 with a December 1959–February 1960 cover date, the standard practice for licensing hot TV titles through the Four Color one-shot pipeline. The issue carried the indicia title 'QUICK DRAW McGRAW, No. 1040' with an internal code of Q.D.M.O.S.#1040-5912, consistent with Dell's one-shot publishing designation. No specific comic-book writer or penciler for this issue is widely documented in open sources, though Harvey Eisenberg is credited on later issues of the ongoing series as cover artist.
Trivia · 8 facts
- First comic book appearance of Quick Draw McGraw, an anthropomorphic white horse sheriff who parodies Western genre tropes, and his Mexican burro sidekick Baba Looey.
- Also contains the first comic book stories featuring Snooper and Blabber (a cat-and-mouse detective team) and Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy — all three segment characters from The Quick Draw McGraw Show.
- Dell Comics officially designated this issue as #1 of the Quick Draw McGraw series; the ongoing title picked up with #2 (April–June 1960).
- The issue's copyright is held by Hanna-Barbera Productions (1959), reflecting the studio's active licensing of its TV characters for print comics.
- The Quick Draw McGraw TV show debuted September 28, 1959, making this comic one of the earliest licensed print tie-ins to the property, issued within weeks of the show's premiere.
- All 45 Quick Draw TV cartoons were written by Michael Maltese, a veteran of the Warner Bros. cartoon studio — lending the show (and by extension its comic adaptation) a sharp Western-satire sensibility.
- Quick Draw's alter ego El Kabong — a Zorro parody who attacks villains by swooping down and hitting them with a guitar — is among the characters associated with this debut era, though his first comic appearance is in a later issue of the ongoing series.
- The ongoing Dell Quick Draw McGraw series ran to at least eleven issues (1960–1962) before the Dell–Western Publishing partnership dissolved and Gold Key Comics absorbed Hanna-Barbera licenses.
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Reprints
Reprinted in Chiquilladas #153 (1965), Huckleberry Hound #28 (1966), Flintstones en andere verhalen #8/1967 (1967), Yogi Bear #34 (1968), Golden Comics Digest #11 (1970), Flintstones en andere verhalen #6/1972 (1972), Familien Flint #3/1979 (1979), Gwandanaland Comics #1128 (2020)
Key issues in Four Color
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