Harold Webster
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Harold Tucker Webster was an American cartoonist. Though Webster's humour sometimes appears gentle, it usually stung. This has made him well known as "The Mark Twain of American Cartoonists". His best known work was a series called The Timid Soul starring the wimpy Caspar Milquetoast.
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.
In 1924, 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". The modern dictionary definition of milquetoast meaning a very shy or retiring person comes from Harold Webster's cartoons.
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, now 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.
The The Timid Soul strip was so successful that Webster's assistant, Herb Roth, took it over when Webster died in 1952. Unfortunately, Herb died in 1953, and the strip faded into history.
On June 22, 1949, the DuMont Television 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 Truex. It wasn't a big hit.
