Humans are all too often portrayed as the heavies in a great many furry animal stories. From Bambi to Watership Down, if there's a human around, chances are he's probably gunnin' for our heroes. When done well, it makes for great drama and thought-provoking social commentary; but cummulatively as a genre, the device is perhaps a little too over-used.
With Hunter Hank, I chose to parody this cliche a little bit while still using him to provide a dangerous adversary for Skippy and Liska. With the other humans in the comic however, I wanted to present more or less normal people who don't really have it in for the animals just for the heck of it.
And so I created the Minderbinders, a nice, decent, mostly harmless family of humans for the forest animals to occasionally come in conflict with. For the most part, neither group is particularily hostile towards the other; the humans enjoy seeing wildlife in it's natural habitat, and the animals enjoy raiding their camp for food and other neat things. Trouble generally occurs due to both sides having conflicting agendas and being somewhat clueless about the other's motivations. Thus, the humans are just as likely to be traumatized by the animals as the animals are by the humans depending on the circumstances; and sometimes one group might even benefit from the actions of the other - for instance, in this case, Liska gets a phone!
Personality-wise, I chose to make Milton and Moira's relationship the opposite of Skippy and Liska's; Milton is the silly, impulsive one while his wife is more serious and responsible. I made Moira an incompetant toy designer to explain why their daughter (and thus, Skippy and Liska) has access to so many weird toys. And I made Milton a pizza delivery driver because, hey, sometimes it's nice to have pizza! The family's name was taken from Milo Minderbinder, the profiteering mess officer from "Catch 22".
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