Review by Ian Keogh

Doctor Wong works for a big evil corporation, and when he discovers what’s planned for his research he backs it up onto a disc and destroys the hard evidence. Unfortunately for him, he’s already been rumbled, and Mr. Stuffins opens with him being chased by armed thugs in shades. He’s caught, but not before he’s managed to hide the disc in one of dozens of boxes in a toy shop containing a teddy bear named Mr. Stuffins.

The bear is almost immediately bought for Zachary, the young son of parents who’re separated. As seen on the sample art, the combination of experimental computer program with a toy bear designed to interact with a child has some surprising consequences. The bear becomes a gun-obsessed military tool, and as the first instructions it hears are to protect Zacahry, it adopts that as its mission. Danger is threatened because the evil corporation want their technology back and have already been shown as ruthless.

Although he’s the co-founder of publisher Boom! Studios, Andrew Cosby’s background is in film, a career shared by co-writer Johanna Stokes, and their comic writing credits are minimal. That being the case the suspicion is that Mr Stuffins is intended primarily as a fundraising tool for a film, one that was never made, although to be fair, it predates the Ted movie by a couple of years. The military mindset of Mr. Stuffins is set against Zachary’s domestic and school circumstances, and while disbelief requires suspending, a collection of scenes raise an occasional smile, and it’s a plot designed to work on cinema screens.

Axel Medellin Machain isn’t an artist prone to putting more than necessary in the panels, but tells the story well enough. The important aspect is not to exaggerate, because doing that would sabotage the idea of believing a large teddy as a military specialist.

Mr. Stuffins is written to an action formula template, and it hits the right emotional beats in the right places, but transparently so and as such is completely predictable.