While working on possible ideas for stories, several plotlines I came up with revolved around Skippy and Liska bumping heads with a couple of veterinarians, so obviously I had to create a couple of characters to fill the role.
Their actual personalities weren't all that important to me; what really mattered was the potential conflict and the well-meaning but adversarial nature of their relationship with Skippy and Liska. They should be competant professionals, not doofuses, and they should actually like the animals and want to help them; BUT they should also be somewhat unprepared to handle Skippy and Liska's little idiosyncracies and be perturbed by them. Sort of like the doctor in Calvin & Hobbes.
I named the male character Dr. Dewdney after A.K. Dewdney, author of The Planiverse, a book that really blew my mind in highschool; for some reason the name just stuck with me and seemed like a good name to give a doctor. The character design was loosely inspired by the stereotypical portrayal of handsome young doctors in 1950's era movies and soap operas - most specifically the Dr. Sanderson character in the 1950 Jimmy Stewart classic Harvey. I named the female character Laverne, simply because the name seemed to fit. Whether or not she is an actual doctor or just a veterinary assistant is ambiguous. Laverne's character design was basically an attempt to draw a cute red-headed anime babe in Mynarski Forest style.
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