From the first, there was a miscalculation on the part of Plum and Chiefy about the bears, that derived from the ideology of human superiority over other animal species. They thought the bears were mugs.
As their creator, I gave the bears neither the power of speech, nor clothing. I created them naked. All I gave them was bellybuttons, and their wits.
Yet Plum and Chiefy never noticed that the bears were more insidious, more cunning and more persistent opponents than the Puttyfoot.
Over the years, stage by stage, ruse by ruse, the bears went through the phases of guerrilla war:
they acquired arms and ammunition from the classic source - the enemy (Plum's lot.)
Finally, by the beginning of 1960, the bears had moved into the phase of being able to wage full scale conventional warfare, with jet fighters, tanks, artillery, bazookas (and an elephant gun.)

The inside Beano pages were printed with red and black ink only (for economy). The colour washes on the original drawing weren't meant for direct reproduction; they were a visual guide for the process people of where to put their mechanical Ben Day dot and line tints (invented in 1879 by a New Jersey printer, Benjamin Day).