Victoria Grace Elliott is a queer comic artist living in Austin, Texas. They’ve written, drawn, and colored two middle grade nonfiction graphic novels, Yummy: A History of Desserts and Tasty: A History of Yummy Experiments (Random House Graphic), which feature my love of sharing history and drawing cute food. Please Be My Star is their YA romance debut and loving reinterpretation of Phantom of the Opera (Scholastic Graphix). They are also the creator of the fantasy webcomic balderdash! or, a tale of two witches.

I had the opportunity to interview Victoria, which you can read below.

First of all, welcome back to Geeks OUT! For those who might not be as familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself?

I’m Victoria Grace Elliott, a queer comic artist and author from Texas, raised in Alabama. My latest graphic novel is my foray into published fiction: the romance Please Be My Star, starring the awkward teen Erika writing a play for her crush, Christian, the cutest boy in her theater class — an overt allusion to Phantom of the Opera but wholly its own story. 

I’ve also made the comics Yummy: A History of Desserts and Tasty: A History of Yummy Experiments, two books featuring a cast of sprites that guide you through the history of various delicious foods!

Before all of these books, I worked on the webcomic balderdash! or, a tale of two witches, a fantasy slice-of-life about two witches that happen to meet in a small town. It’s incomplete, but I still host it online for free. 

What can you tell us about your latest graphic novels, Tasty and Please Be My Star?

What were the inspiration for the books?

In each of these books — probably obviously — I’m working with very different inspirations.

Tasty is a follow-up to Yummy, so it might seem more straightforward, but really it came from an odd fascination with foods that became popular during the Cold War in the US. As a child growing up in Alabama, it seemed like someone would always bring an enchanting pink ambrosia salad to every potluck. The shame was I never got a taste for it, but I was always mesmerized by it. Why canned pineapples? Why Cool Whip? Why maraschino cherries?? Why was it pink?! There tons of other kinds of foods like this I grew with – like boxed macaroni and cheese. And my Grandma made these incredibly decadent sugar cookies every Christmas that were iced mostly with Crisco. But I never saw Crisco in any other recipe! 

All those boxes and canned ingredients were really, truly, why I wanted to write Tasty. Growing up, I took for granted how common processed food was and how it all began. So if I’m being honest, I wanted to write and draw mac & cheese, Crisco, and ambrosia salad. Almost like fanart of some of these foods and ingredients I’d liked and seen all my life, haha.

As for Please Be My Star, my heart and soul lie in narrative storytelling and romance. This is the kind of stuff I was writing as a teenager! I really wanted to return to these personal roots in realistic fiction, especially after writing a fantasy webcomic for years. 

Yummy & Tasty bridged that gap, in a roundabout way. I had already done a lot of historical food research for my webcomic since it featured baking prior to electric technology. Then, with Yummy & Tasty, I was bringing that kind of research explicitly into the real world and into modern times. Not only was I drawing historical cakes & cookies, but I was also drawing my favorite sodas and fancy gelatins. And like I said before, it felt like drawing fanart of some of my favorite foods.

With that mentality, drawing Please Be My Star became a love letter to my high school experience in Texas. Lurking backstage in the theater, walking around a Texas neighborhood near the countryside, watching movies in your basement. It felt like drawing fanart – except now it was of a half-drunk Gatorade (my favorite lunch drink in 9th grade), or a small town Texas gas station, or the memory of a friend I had in high school.

Obviously, there’s also a deep love for Phantom of the Opera in the romance itself. It’s all these elements combined that made me want to make Please Be My Star.

As a creative, what drew you to the art of storytelling, especially graphic novels/comics?

Somehow I’ve always had the impulse to write stories. I suppose it runs in my family; a lot of my family are natural-born southern storytellers. I remember a little sketchbook I had as a kid that I filled with drawings on one half of the spread and fake writing on the other half – this was before I even knew how to write. But I’d read it aloud to myself as if I’d actually written something, haha.

Comics were just natural for me. I wrote a lot of stories by hand in notebooks, but I also loved drawing. So as I started reading more comics – from Garfield to Calvin & Hobbes to my dad’s Conan the Barbarian collection to Dragonball – it was just the logical conclusion. I also really love making a little world entirely on my own, and comics is one of the easiest visual storytelling mediums to make stories on your own, unlike theater or movies.

How would you describe your creative process?

You know, I’ve never sculpted, but I’ve often thought of the way I write stories as sculpting. I start with a really big picture: the idea of a romantic dynamic or a kind of food, then I slowly whittle it down into shape. For nonfiction, it’s a little easier to dive right in and do the research and form the outline from there. With my narrative fiction, the ideas slowly trickle down to me as I draw the characters and obsess over them over the course of a year or two. 

This is part of why I prefer to make my books in a really linear way. After I did the initial writing & page sketches for Tasty, I spent over a year inking & coloring the book. That’s a long time for my mind to get bored and wander off as I work. So during that year plus, my mind was wandering into Please Be My Star, thinking of character designs, scenes I wanted to include, places I wanted to draw. So then, it comes time for me to pitch a new book, and I form the outline based off those wandering thoughts. 

The same thing happened as I did the inking & coloring for Please Be My Star: I came up with a new romantic dynamic for my new book, sketched some new characters, came up with new scenarios and locations. And on and on.

What are some of your favorite elements of writing/illustrating? What do you consider some of the most frustrating and/or difficult? 

God, what a question. I genuinely love every part of the process, but they all have their own drawbacks, too. Like, I love the scripting/sketching part of the process. It’s kinetic and exciting and rewarding pulling the book out of my mind and onto the page. But since I do both writing and drawing at the same time, it requires a truly exhausting amount of brain power for three to five months on end. I can get obsessive and very intense during that process, and it can really wear me out. But man, that sense of accomplishment afterwards is always worth it!

Right now, I’ll say inking is my favorite part of the process. Especially if my sketches are good. I get to really savor every line and every detail, take my time filling in the blackouts, relish every lock of hair or every finger on a hand.

How would you say your process has changed or stayed the same since the beginning of your career?

I am a bit ruthlessly consistent, so it honestly really has not changed that much. If anything, I’m trying to give myself more time to do everything, especially as I keep pushing myself to draw more detailed and write longer books. But the entire process – the trickle of ideas into the writing/sketching into the finalizing the page as I said above — is basically the same as when I started Yummy and not that different from when I started my webcomic. 

The main difference is now I get to make an entire book on my own and release it all at once, which is a huge relief after the hustling lifestyle of a webcomic. Back then, I was trying to churn out a single page every week, or a batch of pages every month, on top of however many other day jobs I had, so I was working too much. Getting constant feedback from readers and worrying about promoting on social media really damaged my sense of confidence in my own storytelling, too. I’m very thankful and very lucky I could make the shift to publishing books. I feel like I can make my best work that’s the most truthful to me like this. I prefer being left to my own devices, haha.

As an artist, who or what would you say are some of your greatest artistic and creative influences and/or sources of inspiration in general?

This changes so much year to year, month to month. I’m always deeply inspired by manga masters like Ai Yazawa and Mari Okazaki, and I always return to their work to study their fashion, inks, romance writing, and layouts. But I love music, movies, and television, too, and those inspire me in all kinds of ways. Directors like Tim Burton, Baz Luhrmann, Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson have really, deeply affected how I write fiction for many years now. And their collaborators – cinematographers like Robert Yeoman, editors like Thelma Schoonmaker, and production designers like Catherine Martin – have undeniably influenced my aesthetics for just as long. The visuals and pacing of those movies: that’s just as important.

As for my favorite singers and actors – from kpop idols to Prince to James Spader – they often have lots of charisma and are constantly in the spotlight having to be attractive. Especially when writing romance, that has affected how I develop leads. The photo shoots singers and actors do for albums or magazines, even the ways they move in music videos and movies and interviews, all of that informs how I draw people, their clothes, their poses.

Fashion magazines lately have been a huge inspiration. These past several years, I keep revolving around old delia*s catalogues and issues of older Japanese fashion magazines like CUTiE and FRUiTS. This goes beyond the fashion and the poses, into the very design of the magazine. Comics benefit from a strong graphic design sensibility, so I’m always pulling design schemas from these.

Aside from your work, what are some things you would want readers to know about you?

As this seems relevant to Please Be My Star, I learned every song from the Andrew Lloyd Webber Phantom of the Opera musical on piano when I was a teenager, and I would sing along as the Phantom while playing songs like Music of the Night. I also deeply love the takarazuka adaptation of Phantom, another Phantom of the Opera musical by Maury Yeston. Wao Youka is stunningly handsome as the Phantom, and her voice is beautiful! I was never involved in the online Phantom of the Opera fandom, per se, but I was one of those fans that got into the musical, read the book, found every adaptation I could find and obsessed over it. I love every different version so much.

What’s a question you haven’t been asked yet but that you wish you were asked (as well as the answer to that question)?

What are you listening to / watching / reading right now? 

I’m listening to Parklife and The Great Escape by blur, His n Hers by Pulp, and Like a Flower by Irene. I just finished my yearly rewatch of Guardian: the Great and Lonely God, and I’m currently watching Black Butler (finally at the circus arc!). And as for reading, I’m working my way through The Age of Surveillance Capitalismby Shoshana Zuboff (though I think I’ll end up listening to an audiobook of it), and I’ve been rereading The Chosen by Chaim Potok.

What advice might you have to give for aspiring comic creators/graphic novelists out there?

Explore and experience all kinds of art. Keep digging. Find your little niches, and don’t let them go. Don’t be ashamed of them; return to them when you need to. If something fascinates you or perplexes you, don’t ignore that feeling. Try to understand why something works or doesn’t work for you. You don’t have to post everything; keep some of your creativity private. If you like an art style, challenge yourself to draw in that style. If you like a kind of writing, see if you can write like that. Your creativity thrives off these little challenges and explorations and protections. Your creativity is a garden, and you must nourish it and tend to it for it to flourish.

Are there any other projects you are working on and at liberty to speak about?

Yes! I’m currently hard at work on my next YA romcom, Finding Myself with You, which follows Alex down the rabbit hole as she exacts revenge on Shayan Santarrosa, the boy who broke her heart. But did Alex really love him or did she want to be him…? It’s a romantic comedy both deeply personal & of my wildest dreams – falling in love & changing each other forever as you become more alike, wading into the liminal space of sexuality & gender. I am having an absolute blast working on it every day, and I hope readers will look forward to reading it when it’s out in Spring 2027.

Finally, what books/authors would you recommend to the readers of Geeks OUT? 

Lately, I’ve really really loved the comics Tiffany’s Griffon by Magnolia Porter Siddell and Maddi Gonzalez and Fresh Start by Gale Galligan with colors by Karen Czap – they’re both incredibly touching, lovingly drawn, and deeply funny books. And please look forward to Flip by Ngozi Ukazu coming out in September. Incredible comics by some amazing cartoonists.