Hi! it’s meeeee, damehelsing from The Drunk Duck Community with another interview!! And for today’s Sunday article I will be interviewing the mighty and fierce PIT_FACE!!!

PIT_FACE, go ahead and introduce yourself!


PIT_FACE: Thank you! Well, I've been working on various comic projects since time immemorial. Putrid Meat has been my most popular so far but I've also worked on things like Brave Resistance, which I co-author/illustrate with Tantz Aerine, I've also worked on The Dead, World Without Flesh, and The Epic of Blitzov which is on hold for the moment. but my current project/ burden of love is Inhabitants. I'm 35 years old, I live in Wisconsin and I am indeed an Opossum.
Here's my link: Inhabitants on The Duck! and you can follow me on Twitter @PIT_FACE1


Wow, PIT! Those are a lot of titles under your belt!! And you’re 35??? You don’t look a day over 27! Actually now I can’t tell if you’ve told me before that you’re 35… Must be the Opossum in you.


PIT_FACE: It’s true! Intense internal rage keeps us young.


Well, I hope that works for me. I’ve got a lot of rage in me. Or so I’m told. By many.
ANYWAY, haha, for this interview, I really want to talk about you and your work with Inhabitants, mainly because it’s my favorite spooky comic with possible dead things, so, I desperately need to know the mastermind behind this, what went through your mind when you were creating Inhabitants?


PIT_FACE: Oh, coming up with Inhabitants has been an absolute thrill! I've pretty much been Frankensteining together a bunch of ideas and concepts that have struck my fancy.
Helmut is inspired by the likes of Rob Halford of Judas priest. This is still the beginning of his story yet. I basically wanted to make something that feeds the urge in me to just see really incredibly cool shit. I often tell people, “think Gwar meets Sailor Moon”.


Gwar meets Sailor Moon is actually a really cool short description to give. Also I'm assuming Helmut's leather outfits are inspired by Rob Halford? Because I will say Helmut looks like a soft cutie compared to him.


PIT_FACE: lol! bingo! Well I like gimp masks and what not. I'm not really into S)


Ah yes, the “turnip man” - I absolutely hate that you've put baby Helmut in this situation. I think about it almost daily. But in all seriousness, you've definitely got the slow burn horror down! The situations are just perfect for it and leaves a very unsettling feeling that just grows greater the longer something is unknown.


PIT_FACE: oh thank you! it's definitely super slow burn when a page takes 20 years to make on top of it, lol


Now, you started Inhabitants during the pandemic, how has it been to work on the comic during quarantine?


PIT_FACE: to be honest, I think it's really helped keep me more level than I otherwise would be. The pandemic has been a challenge in itself but like a lot of people, I've also had a number of other issues that aren't Covid related but still exacerbated by it. I think that's why it was time for me to make something like Inhabitants. I think I was really yearning to have this massively cool thing that I could control. A lot of times when things start to feel a bit too much, thinking about what I have planned for Inhabitants helps a lot.


This pandemic was and is still tough on a lot of people. A ton of fellow comic creators actually lost their interest or have been blocked because of the horrible effects that the pandemic caused and of course, 2020 was in general a horrible year, that year was full of tragedy. But I'm really glad Inhabitants helped you out. It's like that one blanket or pillow you hold tightly when things are tough and you're not sure what to do, almost like the one safe edge you KNOW you can grasp when hanging off of a cliff.


PIT_FACE: exactly right! This is my little corner of the universe! The law of Pit-face rules all!
But yeah, I’ve been pretty fortunate.


Since Inhabitants is a pretty new comic, not even reaching its first birthday yet, is it a story that you’ve had in your mind for awhile or was it something that came to you and you decided you just wanted to bring it to life?


PIT_FACE: It's kind of been brewing for a while now. Like Putrid Meat, it had earlier versions that were totally different. Like Helmut first started as a video game character I used to play on different free MMO sites. Then I incorporated him into some writing exercises that Tantz and I write in our free time and he was this romantic sort of save the princess templar type, holy roller, which was a pretty different thing for me to write after writing Bones for over 10 years. But also like with Putrid Meat, it had that “epiphany” moment where I realized what I wanted to do with it.
Having Helmut become an exterminator for an infinite apartment building built on the outskirts of the world of the dead but for mortal people was just too good to pass up. It's been so ripe for all sorts of things. It made me pretty much instantly throw out all of the old ideas I only felt half right about and start from scratch. but before that, it had been slowing cooking in primordial thought soup for a few years.


Okay, I'm gonna have to stop you right there, Helmut becoming an exterminator for an INFINITE apartment building that is built on the outskirts of the world of the dead but for mortal people - sounds like an awesome game if I'm being honest. Kind of like an S)