Swamp Story

Words from Gruff Rhys on American Interior (2025 Remastered Bonus Edition) Revisiting American Interior 11 years later, feels very prescient. In following the unusual story of explorer John Evans (1770-1799), it becomes clear that faked narratives can have profound and unpredictable consequences in real life. His barely believable journey of verification in searching through continental scale wilderness for a [fictitious] Welsh speaking tribe believed to be living on the Great Plains of North America (an ancient folk tale perpetuated by the Elizabethan court following the subjugation of Wales, to make colonial claims on behalf of the British on the Americas) had a dramatic political effect on the fledgling USA and a devastating impact on himself and some of those who helped him on his way. I wrote an album of songs inspired by his life; American Interior, which also served as a soundtrack to a documentary film based on a book that detailed his journey, intertwined with my own investigative concert tour, all three of which I worked on simultaneously. It took me a while to process the whole experience and its lessons and feel I owe it to my former self to take these songs back on the road for a couple of months and re-tell the story for a new decade.

A disfigured, mentally unstable mercenary who started as a supervillain but gained cult popularity because of the character's peculiar balance of angst and pop culture slapstick blended with an almost non-stop stream of irreverent asides that have the tendency to break the fourth wall (the fourth wall is the boundary between the fictional setting and the audience; when this is "broken", i.e., the character directly speaks to the audience or readers; this means that he or she is aware of his standing in the story vis-a-vis the readers). Hence, "The Merc with the Mouth." This is the initial six-part story arc entitled, "Head Trips" and a double-sized issue #7 with Deadpool roughing and tumbling through several alternate realities. Sort of like breaking through the fourth wall in a tesseract...

The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb is a 1993 stop-motion animated film made by bolexbrothers, and funded by the BBC, La Sept, producer Richard Hutchinson and Manga Entertainment, which also distributed the film on video. Though it draws its title character from the fairy tale Tom Thumb, the story and setting is substantially different, depicting Tom as a fetus-like child living in a grim and squalid urban environment.
The story follows the tiny Tom Thumb as he is abducted from his loving parents and taken to an experimental laboratory, and his subsequent escape. He discovers a community of similarly-sized people living in a swamp, who help him on his journey to return to his parents. The film is largely dialogue-free, limited mostly to grunts and other non-verbal vocalizations.
The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb was made using a combination of stop-motion animation and pixilation (live actors posed and shot frame-by-frame), often with live actors and puppets sharing the frame. It was originally commissioned as a 10 minute short for BBC2's Christmas programming, but was rejected for being too dark for the festive season. The short version nevertheless garnered critical acclaim through showings at animation festivals, and a feature-length version was commissioned by the BBC a year later.