Caspar Milquetoast
American comic strip character
Caspar Milquetoast is a fictional character created by H. T. Webster for his comic strip The Timid Soul. Webster described Caspar Milquetoast as "the man who speaks softly and gets hit with a big stick". The character's name is derived from a bland and fairly inoffensive food, milk toast, which, light and easy to digest, is an appropriate food for someone with a weak or "nervous" stomach.
History
In 1912, Webster drew a daily panel for the New-York Tribune, under a variety of titles—Our Boyhood Ambitions, Life's Darkest Moment, The Unseen Audience. In 1924, Webster moved to the New York World and soon after added The Timid Soul featuring the wimpy Caspar Milquetoast. Milquetoast developed out of the design of another character, Egbert Smear, or The Man in the Brown Derby. The character was said to have ushered in a new era of timidity in comics.
In 1927, Webster trained himself to draw left-handed in three months after a severe case of arthritis impaired the use of his right hand. In 1931, the World folded, and that same year, Simon & Schuster published a collection of The Timid Soul reprints. Webster then went back to the Tribune (now known as the New York Herald Tribune), where he launched a Timid Soul Sunday strip.
The public source identifies “Caspar Milquetoast” as american comic strip character. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Caspar, Milquetoast and American.
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This entry incorporates text from “Caspar Milquetoast” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.