Four Color #698

This 1956 Dell one-shot captures Francis the Famous Talking Mule at his most delightfully absurd — wearing headphones and declaring to his pal Pete that the buzzing flies swarming around them must be uranium, while Pete crouches with a Geiger counter in the desert Southwest. Al Scaduto's cover art is lively and warm, squeezing genuine comic charm out of the era's atomic-age craze translated into mule-prospecting slapstick. A cheerful snapshot of mid-1950s humor that still raises a smile.