Harold Webster

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Harold Tucker Webster was an American cartoonist. His first cartoons appeared in the New York Tribune in 1912, when he was in his mid-twenties. He changed his titles, based on what type of humour was within the panel; some were: Our Boyhood Ambitions, The Unseen Audience, and Life's Darkest Moment.

Though Webster's humour sometimes appears gentle, it usually stung. This has made him well known as "The Mark Twain of American Cartoonists".

In 1924, however, he moved his panels to The New York World. Soon after, he added The Timid Soul to his list of cartoons. This would soon become one of his most well-known panels. It features Caspar Milquetoast, a wimpy character whose name is derived from milk toast. Harold Webster himself describes Caspar Milquetoast as "the man who speaks softly and gets hit with a big stick".

In 1931, the World folded. Also in 1931, Simon & Schuster brought out the only collection of reprints from The Timid Soul. Harold Webster then went back to the Tribune — only now it was called The New York Herald-Tribune. He then began a Sunday page of The Timid Soul alone, where readers could more closely peer into Caspar's life.

Because the strip was so successful, Webster's assistant Herb Roth took it over when Webster died in 1952. Unfortunately, Herb died in 1953, and then the strip faded into history.

On June 22, 1949, the Dumont TV network tried to bring The Timid Soul to the television. They made it the premiere presentation of their Program Playhouse series. Playing Caspar Milquetoast was Ernest Truest. It wasn't a big hit.

In the dictionary, milquetoast means a very shy or retiring person. This was taken, of course, from Harold Webster's cartoons.