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The Old Geezer was inspired by a number of folks I used to follow many years ago on the alt.animals.foxes usenet newsgroup who posted reports and photos of their fox-watching observations to the group. (Check out Janet Wright's PEI Foxes and John Martin's Oklahoma Foxes on The World of Vickie Fox web page for a few examples!)
At some point I figured it would be funny to introduce a kindly human character who enjoyed watching Mynarski Forest's animals in a similar manner but ended up getting into trouble as a result. I wanted the character to be a really nice person who even Liska liked to show that even when she's trying to be friendly to people, horrible things wind up happening. I chose to make the character a frail old man to make him more prone to the various calamities that befall him; to make him seem more harmless, sympathetic and likeable to both the readers and the animals (making the various misfortunes that befall him more ironic and funny) ; and because elderly people have distinct traits that would be fun to include in a character and differentiate him a bit from the younger humans. I decided against giving the character a name and had the animals simply refer to him as The Old Geezer in part because I figured it would be more humorous if the character was just "some guy" rather than a specific person, and in part because I just think the word "geezer" is funny. It implies in my mind that the verb "to geez" is an actual word describing something that old people tend do, but nobody remembers what. Regardless of whatever his real name is, we eventually learn in a later strip that he is Moira Minderbinder's father, so it probably starts with an M! :) |
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