The Best of H. T. Webster: A Memorial Collection

by H.T. Webster

Excerpt from The Best of H. T. A Memorial Collection Webster denounced Wives, as a class, in And There's Nothing You Can Do about It, and he excoriated Husbands, as a class, in How To Tor ture Your Wife. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Genres: Cartoon, Comics, Humor

257 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1953

About the author

Full name: Harold Tucker Webster.

Reviews

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

In many ways, no group of people are better at expressing opinions about the human condition in general and their specific environment in particular than the cartoonist. Harold Tucker Webster, with a career that spanned approximately forty years, was one of the best of his time. His most memorable character was the extremely wimpy Caspar Milquetoast, derived from the two words “milk toast.” He died of a sudden heart attack in 1952.
This book is a collection of his best cartoons and covers many of the social mores of the United States in the twenties through the forties. There are scenes of people playing bridge, golf and other activities with a boss, and married couples engaged in speech laden with understood inner meanings. This was an expression of public marital discord suitable for the times.
Other cartoons express some of the issues that children faced. For example, there is the one where a boy brings his mother a bouquet of wildflowers that is goldenrod, a plant she is highly allergic to. Some of the cartoons have a serious political bite. None more expressive than the one that has a KKK member in full regalia and blood on his “dress” throwing a coiled rope to two children and telling them, “Souvenir kiddies.” This points out something that has been mentioned in other writings, that the KKK members that killed the undesirables at night generally went home to their families and thought nothing of their vile deeds.
Part a history lesson of cartooning and a look back at the nation during Webster’s peak years, this is a book that will entertain and make you think a little different about the world.

[Steeter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I grew up with this book. My parents had a copy and I loved looking through it as a kid, even if I didn’t get all the jokes. Decades later, when I saw a copy on a bottom shelf of a musty used book store in New Orleans, I knew I was destined to buy it. Now I get them, the cartoons about the inner life of married couples. I value the high quality of H.T. Webster’s drawing, his use of the empty space newspapers allowed cartoonists back then. He gives us the lives of regular people in eras hard for us to recall now, from the 1890s when he himself was growing up to the early 50s and the birth of television. But it’s important to note that, for all his surface geniality, there was a bite in most of his cartoons. Even characters who seem to be on top of the world are not the hotshots they think they are, and if nobody in the cartoon knows it, the reader knows it. The pretensions of the rich in particular get punctured quite often. I do think my life has been enriched by loving these cartoons as a boy, then fully understanding them as a man. Recommended.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charming cartoons. The Caspar Milquetoast ones were my favorite.
I never learned how to play bridge, so the bridge cartoons admittedly went over my head.
The radio cartoons captured the vapid nature of radio drama and advertising, which reminded me of this scene from A Letter to Three Wives (1949):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uczFR...

One cartoon from 1923 especially stood out, an eerie prediction of AI:

[Martin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this up in an estate sale as part of large lot. I hadn't heard of Webster, and today he is probably only remembered for his character, Mr. Milquetoast, the source of the word most often used to describe Don Knotts.

The cartoons are sometimes amusing, occasionally a chuckle, and never a laugh.

[Mgb · Rating 5 out of 5]

The details of life in these cartoons are different, but the emotions are the same. I was most struck by the KKK cartoon….was this shocking or funny in 1946? I hope shocking. Even the cartoons that are a miss make me wonder what I am not recognizing a hundred years later.

[Dominick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a mildly amusing collection of cartoons by the creator of Caspar Milquetoast. I don't think I knew that before reading this book; it must be pretty cool to invent a word that becomes part of the language. Based on the cartoons, though, it's a bit difficult to see why it caught on so well. These are perfectly fine cartoons, but none really seemed distinctive or ingenious to me. I don't think I laughed out loud once while reading them, though I was gently amused several times. That seems to be Webster's strength, a gentle, inoffensive and undistinguished humour. Ditto his draftsmanship; he draws well and vividly, but nothing here makes him stand out the way the cartoonists I think of as genuinely top-notch do. Part of my issue might be that Webster was interested in a lot of things I don't much care about--tons of cartoons about the card game bridge, for instance, which may very well be hilarious to bridge fans but which pretty much left me cold. Interesting from a historical perspective, basically.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

The tone of the gags of this cartoonist were between friendly and sharp in his day. There are still several gags that would run well in today's strip. What I like about his collected work is the double dialog of whats happening in the word balloon and what's happening on the page. Also, his cartoons aren't cramped. They feel free to have large amounts dedicated to background. What's not heavily mentioned in this book is that he had an assistant who did the backgrounds while he worked on the primary characters. This book is a must-see for would-be cartoonists.

[Valerie]

Caspar Milquetoast is the type specimen of out lost heritage of meekness. We've become too much swept along by our societal obsession with combat and assertiveness, and it's time to get back to gentler roots.

I'm not sure if it's in this collection, but one of my favorite cartoons shows Caspar standing in front of a sign saying "Watch this space", and he responds that if nothing happens in the next half hour, he's leaving.