The actual origins of Teddy Bear World are lost back in the mists of time. I had some kind of teddy bears and other cuddly toys my entire life, and played with them. That was about it.
I DO remember that I saw a "live action"(ish) adaption of Corduroy on TV once, when I was no older than about 3. I thought Corduroy was MY teddy bear, Loodie, who had "run away", and bawled my eyes out. Corduroy otherwise "passed me by" as a kid, my mum and I could remember this happening for years afterwards, but it wasn't until about 2011 that I re-found the movie I'd watched all those years ago (and discovered that it was based on a well-known book!). My memories of it had been completely distorted in the meantime, I remembered it being stop-motion, set in Britain, and Corduroy somehow getting outside. It turned live-action only once he escaped, with people having picnics in a park, and a girl "adopting" the bear.
Teddy Bear World really began when I was around 7 or 8. My brother and I had a fair few teddy bears and other stuffed animals, We decided that, as we had to go to school, our teddy bears should go to "school" too, and stuffed them in the airing cupboard. Our mum probably got annoyed by finding them all crammed on the shelves, leaving no room for clean towels. There was also something about them joining some sort of club and getting bags full of stuff like ID cards and things, during a time when we had bunk beds in the same room.
Teddy Bear World really picked up around the time I was 10 or 11. It took on a more sci-fi setting because my other sci-fi idea, Galactic Conquest, was being pulled apart. I wanted to make a film of it, necessitating borrowing my uncle's camcorder, and thus letting my Trekkie cousin in on the action. Naturally he just wanted to turn it into a TMP-era Star Trek fanfilm. Meanwhile my friend Robert (of Anti-Bully fame) insisted it also contain various Lego Space factions. For years afterwards, I kept Galactic Conquest as this unholy mangulation of mismatched ideas... but Teddy Bear World was all (well, mostly, my brother did bits too) mine!
One of the first parts of Teddy Bear Wars to be made into a comic strip was about a penguin, called Penguin Fellow (the setting had some brilliantly imaginative names, as you can see) training to fly a jet pack. This was actually acted out by tying string to him, and swinging him up and down the stairs. In the old setting, there were many different animals (just like the soft toys we owned), though when I made the "main" original comic strip, I judiciously omitted most of those. In the remake, everybody will be teddy bears.
"Curlyfur" was supposed to be the "Teddy Bear version of Hitler", who had mysteriously disappeared at the end of an ill-defined war some time in the past. That part was probably added later, I'm pretty sure we hadn't thought up Curlyfur when this was drawn.
As you can see (maybe, through all that messy scribble!),the penguin is flying over a waterfall that looks rather too much like a staircase. The shadowy city in the background has a very strange-shaped building in it. That's because it's actually based on some part that came with a Frankenstein-like Mighty Max toy! This was an early sign of Teddy Bear Wars being set around the house, with various "mind-repurposed" toys standing-in for things. For a while, that Mighty Max toy, when opened out, was the "map" of Teddy Bear City, the capital city of their planet. This city later grew to Mega-City One proportions
The setting was still "cute" at this stage; the attacking enemies were always able to parachute out in time, Also they were using stun lasers. I much later (as in, June 1st 2026, as I started revamping these pages!) retconned these bits to "training", though it still looks pretty dangerous! Early Lego-played Galactic Conquest had a set of cool characters with their own unique ships, fighting an identical number of cool "baddies" on a plateau on a planet (aka the dining room table). They'd always use stun lasers and the defeated side would be sure to rescue knocked-out comrades and get away. As we only had a limited number of teddy bears, early Teddy Bear Wars worked in much the same way.
There was also, inevitably, ideas being tossed around / acted out for a Teddy Bear Wars videogame, based on a game we played with teddy bears, a cardboard box, and a bunk bed. Basically the player had to move backwards and forwards in a hovering van full of pillows, to catch bears thrown off the roof by some baddie or monster. I remember this being towards the end of the 16-bit era, as I was imagining the graphics to be something like Vectorman mixed with Earthworm Jim 2. Not that "move back and forth to catch things" was much of a game. Might have been a good minigame as part of something larger. There were also the inevitable plans for a sidescrolling platform shooter, too. I remember desiging a level where players had to negotiate the "Bearlin Wall", made out of forcefields, though there was never much of an explanation of why such a thing existed, other than rule-of-cool
Some time later, I was waking up one morning and there was either some crashing and banging outside, or a teddy bear was laying on a pile of clothes in the dark room, or both. Either way I decided that Teddy Bear City was suffering from a rain of meteors that were causing untold destruction (though still remarkably little injury!). The bear laying in a pile had been flying a heavy cargo-lift ship, which was hit by one of the meteors and crashed. This idea also made it's inevtitable way into a comic. It turned out the asteroids were being broken up into small pieces and fired at the planet by some bad guy (I think his name was just "Scar", for obvious reasons, but don't hold me to that). The Teddy Bear Space Force destroys his ship, but he takes to an escape pod in time, lands in Teddy Bear City, and a car chase ensues.
The car based, I beleive, on one seen in Sonic the Comic circa issue 105.
The idea of baddies dropping loads of meteors on Teddy Bear World persisted for a while. I would play endless Asteroids on the Game Boy, imagining that teddy bears were flying out in spaceships to stop the swarm before it got to the planet. When they got hit, they'd always get out in an egg-shaped "Eggscape Pod". This name was likely inspired by a certain infamous Sonic book we had in the UK.
Some time after that, it was November 1st, and some fireworks started going off outside. My brother yelled out "That's early!" from his room. I started "mind repurposing" the fireworks into a Galactic Conquest scene, where some terrorists were shooting rockets up at orbiting ships, which needed to be shot down before they got there. Soon after, I mind-repurposed the fireworks into a Teddy Bear World scenario. More meteors were heading for the planet, which needed to be blasted with missiles or (invisible) lasers before they hit the ground. I even started putting paper "skyscrapers" on my windows. If a neighbour's firework failed and exploded on the ground, I'd tear chunks off one of the skyscrapers, saying it was "damage to the city". Why yes, the game Missile Command was also played a lot!
This swiftly evolved into the idea of the Teddy Bear planet passing through an asteroid field at around November 5th every year. I also imagined that earlier on this had been like the Blitz in WW2, back when the Teddy Bears had more primitive technology, and had to shoot at incoming asteroids with artillery cannons.
By this time, the main "baddies" in Teddy Bear World were The Squatters. This was based on that great cinematic jewel, erm, Robocop 3. Yes, that turkey not only inspired The Gun, it inspired Teddy Bear World too! Honestly I just plain didn't understand what "squatters" even were. In the movie they were sympathetic characters (and "squatting" in their own homes, which corrupt city officials had sold out from under them). I do vaguely remember seeing a news segment about a "squatters estate agency", which listed empty properties and "if they have an alarm or not". Anybody setting off alarms must be a baddie, right?
The Squatters were soon replaced by Droids. This was because all of the teddy bears we owned were "main characters", so if they were going to be shooting other teddy bears that looked the same, these were obviously robot copies! The robots were built by some baddie or other, for some nefarious purpose (neither of which was ever explored). This obviously draws inspiration from the Sonic franchise, as well as Terminator! At least, this is what happened in the games we played with our actual teddy bears. In the comics I could come up with new characters, such as Scar, seen in the comic above.
We were also getting 2000AD by this time, so influence from Mega-City One crept in. As did the "Theme-" games, which had Pokey Cola!
Soon the "droids" were replaced by "clones". videogames with gore, like Doom, Mortal Kombat and Duke3D, were in the cultural discourse of the time... and we loved 'em! Clones were copies of teddy bears, but had red blood instead of "fluff" inside them. We never really thought much about where the "clones" were coming from, either. I think at first some nefarious baddie was making the clones somewhere on Teddy Bear Planet, but pretty soon they became aliens. I never really explained where they came from beyond that, but they regularly sent covert infiltrators (who would perform huge terrorist attacks, take over buildings and rampage in giant mechs. Very covert!) to Teddy Bear World. Other times, the clones attacked in big spaceships, including a flow of "Megasteroids", big flat asteroids with giant spaceships grafted onto / into them. The Teddy Bears would send up fighters to do battle with these, or else send secret agent bears aboard to infiltrate and sabotage them. A few were blown up in space, while at least one made a controlled crash landing just off a coast somewhere (a dangling gun emplacement obliterating a quaint old clifftop cottage in the process).
I also started building up the Teddy Bear world setting a bit more. I drew a world map, which looked like a smiling teddy bear face, with a long tall continent in the west (not unlike the one on the FF7 world map, which was about to crash into Teddy Bear World in a big way), two islands for "ears", two linked continents for "eyes", a big triangle island as the "nose" and a long eastern continent as a "smile". By this time in the world's history there was one government, heaquartered in Teddy Bear City. Numerous other major cities existed, with their own "local" governments, but the whole world was united, and had no countries. Most of the cities had names that were terrible bear-related puns, such as "Bearlin", which inevitably had a big force-field wall in the middle of it, for absolutely no reason. There was also "Gundville", named after the tag in a big grey bear's ear (actually, Gund is a company that makes teddy bears).
Instead of driving over the ocean in their flying cars, they'd take big long-range hover ships across the oceans. You may notice this one looks suspiciously like a Y-wing. I was likely mind-repurposing some Star Wars toy.
Whenever we went on holiday, we'd take some teddy bears with us. These would be supposedly sent on a mission to another part of the world, and the caravan / holiday home we stayed in would be that city. Once again with furniture "mind repurposed" into buildings. The drive there would be the trip in the giant high-speed hover ship.
The two buildings here inspired by the two single beds in the room my brother and I shared, in one holiday home. This home had some other teddy bears that "came with" it, who we could use as "enemies" without having to remove any of our "heroes".
Another character was called Watson. He had a bunny hoodie and said "oooo" a lot
One memorable time we were camping, but I envisioned the campsite as Teddy Bear City. In the eventual "main" Teddy Bear Wars comic, you might notice the police headquarters, and a refuelling station, look suspiciously like giant tents! That particular trip ignored the main characters for a time, and focused on teddy bear cops, chasing ordinary criminals high in the sky above the city. My brother and I screaming the appropriate siren sound effects at the top of our lungs, while running in and out of the tents. I'm sure the other campers just loved that! By this time, it was the Playsation era (and Sega Power had given way to Playstation Power, one issue of which had the words "QUEEN BITCH" emblazoned across the cover for anyone to see in the supermarket. The 90's: A magical time), so I came up with a 3d flying-car-chase game based on this idea. No more 2D platformers!
Also some inspiration from one of the few rides we got to go on when we went to Sega World. My brother won a trip there with unlimited rides, and we went on a bank holiday weekend - you know, a time when it would be at full capacity, and pretty much all of the main rides were fuckin' broken. Still one of the biggest disappointments of my life.
Speaking of the Playstation, we had heard about this amazing game called Final Fantasy 7. We had no idea what it was about, only that it was amazing. We'd never been very big RPG players, though we'd rented a few. We'd also heard that Final Fantasy 7 was on THREE discs! Imagine that! All the games we'd had before had been one one cartridge, so imagine THREE entire CD's! Anyway, we didn't get it for a while, but one of our friends did. We went over his and watched, enraptured, as he wandered about, not sure what to do, in the crossdressing Cloud quest. When my brother and I got home we then proceeded to kick ourselves for not asking what disc he was on. It was almost disappointing to find out he was still on the first. But if that was the first, imagine what a mega-epic the second and third must be!
Anyway, we soon got our own copy of FF7, and I became somewhat obsessed with Final Fantasy for at least the next five years. As you can no doubt tell by the fact the longest comic I've ever made is basically an FF7 fanfic. It got to the point my brother would fake power cuts (by looking out of the window and "accidentally" kicking the switch on the socket) to get me off the Playstation. Teddy Bear World started to take on a number of RPG-ish aspects, with "lasers" and "missiles" that do certain "amounts" of damage. We also played a kind of teddy bear battle game, where we'd take turns to move our "armies" and have them hit, kick, shoot, use lasers etc on each other. This also fed back into my grandiose plans for the Teddy Bear World videogame. Now it was going to be like FF7, but with more Zelda-like real-time combat and the whole gameworld would be in beautiful pre-rendered graphics. Though that would probably require about 7 discs!
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Notice the smashed-up roads inspired by FF7's slums. The justification being that Teddy Bear World had had flying cars long since, so the roads were neglected. Apparently nobody walks!
The setting of Teddy Bear World was pretty much fully developed by this point... or at least as much as it was going to be. They had routine space travel, but I hadn't thought up any planets for them to actually go to, other than "Luna". Luna was supposedly their moon, but it looked like a gas giant, with floating cities like off Star Wars. Most of the development was still done through acting things out with the actual teddy bears, or the odd incidental picture.
I do remember updating my plans for the videogame, as well as having a world the size of FF7, I also wanted it to play like Tomb Raider. There was also some inspiration from the Fifth Element and the Action Man (UK version that was later renamed ATOM) cartoons and (very lame) live action segments, which my brother had a VHS of. We also got into Time Crisis, so of course ideas for a Teddy Bear World rail shooter popped up. The Teddy Bear police cars were heavily influenced by Space Precinct.
For a fair while, some of the teddy bears had super powers, but this was just kind of taken as a matter of course. A pair of twins were called Mighty Bear and Speedy Bear. One had Superman's strength and resilience, the other had Daredevil's speed. Sonic was also still in the setting, and another bear called Shrinky-Dink had the ability to shrink (well, get scrunched up a bit). The idea for Shrinky-Dink was invented because our granny bought us two small bears that looked like Speedy and Mighty, and a I briefly tricked my brother into thinking I'd really shrunk them. Oddly, the actual Shrinky-Dink was a different bear. The "Mini" Speedy and Mighty became different characters. My one loved pies, and can be seen in the main comic strip commanding a tank, and wielding a revolver nearly as big as he is.
Notice the pie references. Also a reference to "Estrella", which is Spanish for "star". But at the time I only knew it as the name of a website where you could get Total Anniahlation mods.
Towards the end of the playing-about-with-actual-teddy-bears times, inspiration from The Guyver, The Matrix, the Front Mission games and Sin crept in. The clones were countering the super-powered bears with "enhancements" to their cloning process, creating clones with super-strength and speed. Non-powered bears responded by wearing armoured robotic suits that gave them similar abilities. I now wanted to make a videogame something like Soul Caliber (which I'd seen round my cousin's house) mixed with Streets Of Rage, only with guns, gore and lots of scenery destruction.
By now it was 1999, and I got my first PC! I got online and swiftly became an ever-so-grown-up Anarchist, who beleived in "serious stuff like politics" (politics with the idea of organising the global economy along the lines of the coloured pencil tray at a playschool, very grown-up). There was a period of a few months where I continued with my comics The Gun and Teddy Bear Wars, alongside the proto-Insanity Please, but otherwise the Teddy Bear World was left mostly forgotten. As I treated furniture in my room as "buildings", I did make an animated gif of several Teddy Bear World adverts, to be displayed on a "giant screen" on a building.
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When the 1999 eclipse happened, I went to stay with my aunt and granny in Plymouth for a while. There was also a big fireworks display on the Hoe (the eclipse was made into a week-long festival), so I pretended another Megasteroid was coming, but had fired a large number of meteors ahead of it to "soften up" Teddy Bear City, before landing to take over. That was the one the teddy bears infiltrated and sabotaged, causing it to splashdown in the sea..
In 2004, I got my first job, paid hosting, and vastly expanded the website. I briefly thought about scanning Teddy Bear Wars, and even considered continuing it, in the same art style! But I couldn't be bothered. All I did was add it to the "story chronology" page, which was the prototypical (and much smaller) Story Info.
In 2015, I was doing one of my "bursts" of updating Insanity Please, but was also due to go on holiday, so I used Teddy Bear Wars as a filler strip. That was it's only online presence. Shortly after that, I started developing ideas to reboot the story. First of all, I came up with a proper solar system for the teddy bears to live in. "Luna", despite the fact it means "moon", was now an actual gas giant, and Teddy Bear World orbits it. Exoplanet surveys have actually found it's normal for gas giants to be close to stars, so this one is in the habitable zone. Having other moons close to Teddy Bear World spurred them on to develop space travel. There's also another habitable world in the system, much like old conceptions of Venus as a jungle planet, so there's something for them to explore in future. I also thought up an actual origin and explanation for the Clones!
Teddy Bear World when Luna is eclipsing the sun. This happens every other day, creating a "dark day"
Another moon is like Europa, with a huge ocean covered with a thick ice cap. The teddy bears have built underwater cities in this ocean
On the jungle planet, it's incredibly humid and misty down there
The jungle planet has a very white "pumice stone" moon, which brightly reflects the sun back onto the surface, meaning it's never really dark there.
A flying bike designed for the setting.
The only issue that remains for the remake (other than laziness from overwork / brainrot addiction) is coming up with a decent art style! I want Teddy Bear World to be totally distinct from my other "British adventure" strips. I'm working on developing something like a cross between 1980's anime and retro Furry art, also of the 70's and 80's (unlike the modern fursonas, which are all wolves or foxes and differ only in the number of colours in their rainbow hair and what kind of heterochromatia / vitilligo they have). Not quite there yet, but I think I'm heading in the right direction...
The style of the new Teddy Bear Wars will remain very "the future of the 90's", expect lots of bulky "pocket computers", 90's-looking cars (based on unmade concepts from real life, only without wheels!) and colours other than black, white, grey, silver and blue!
Turns out I made two sets of animated gif ads, back in the day, so here's the the other!