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Cupples and Leon Co. 1902-1956
In 1903, Cupples & Leon collected such strips as The Katzenjammer Kids. Alphonse and Gaston, Happy Hooligan, On and Off the Ark, Poor Lil Mose and The Tigers. Their major competitor in books of comic strip reprints was Frederick A. Stokes, who died in 1939.
To reprint comic strips, the company offered, for 25 cents, a square-bound paperback format of 52 pages of black-and-white strips between flexible cardboard covers. Between 1906 and 1934, Cupples & Leon published more than 100 titles in that format. They collected Bringing Up Father, Little Orphan Annie, Reg'lar Fellers, Smitty, Tillie the Toiler and other leading strips of the 1920s and 1930s.[2] They left the comic strip reprint field in 1934, concentrating on their juvenile lines, just as the modern day comic book was introduced that same year with Famous Funnies.
Victor Cupples died in Mount Vernon, New York in July 1941. Arthur Leon, who lived in New Rochelle, New York, died in December 1943, and his wife, Louise Heroy Leon, died five years later in February 1948.
The Platt and Munk publishing firm acquired Cupples & Leon in 1956. |
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