We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Vic Iddstar Hill. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Vic Iddstar below.

Vic Iddstar, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

Picture this: I was a nobody living a very unremarkable life in England. Lots of big ideas and big dreams, I was making comics even then, but it was all on a small scale. I was very much of the mindset that big exciting lives happened to *other* people.

And then… I got into an off-beat, niche tv show on the SyFy channel and did a bit of fanart for it, and shared it online. Little did I know, the fandom was of the NO CHILL variety and I suddenly found myself part of a huge, global community of fans, many of whom were in the USA. A pop culture convention in Vegas was coming up and all my fandom friends were attending and wanted me to as well. I’d never been to America before. Never been on a plane. Didn’t even have a passport, but it felt right to ride this wild wave and so I expedited my passport, booked a plane ticket and flew to Vegas to meet a bunch of people for the first time in a new country. From there, more lifechanging events followed – more art, more creative collabs and projects, I even married one of these fandom peeps and started a greencard application to move to the USA. With some pandemic travel hiccups in the mix, I got stranded in the States in 2020 and decided to just take the plunge and stay.

While the marriage didn’t work out and the fandom has now died down, this journey and this insane-feeling risk I took to just follow where life was leading me has brought incredible things and people into my life, including amazing friends and creative partners, opportunities like storyboarding for indie animation shows I’ve followed for decades, making comics for D&D Beyond, travelling and seeing places and experiencing things I could never have dreamed before all this began. Now I’m making my own comics, working on collab projects with super talented people that I can’t wait to share with the world, and plotting a course forward in a life I would once have thought could only happen to *other* people.

There have been hard times, not everything worked out, but it’s all been worth it for the adventures and the triumphs. Moral is: take the risk.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Vic Iddstar Hill (they/them) and I make comics (and illustrations, films, animations, and tabletop gaming worlds), run D&D games, and tell stories! Right now I’m producing a chosen-family, fantasy adventure webcomic inspired by my homebrew D&D game, called ‘Of Destiny & Dragoones’ along with a few other comic and D&D projects coming up in the works soon.

I am also the creator of the cute werewolf coffee shop romance mini-comic ‘Moon Beans’, the children’s book ‘Duncan Potterly’s Extensive Compendium of House Monsters’, artist for the official D&D Beyond comics 2021/2022, award-winning filmmaker, and have made several other comic series, short films, musical compositions, and random craft projects at any given moment. I’ve been a storyboard artist, a wedding videographer, an animator, a workshop teacher, marketing professional, and I did a brief stint at Build-A-Bear Workshop making teddy bears and forcing grumpy adults to make wishes and play along with the magic.

As one of those perpetually arty kids from the get-go, I have always tried a thousand different hobbies and crafts which comes in handy with the consistently varied assortment of projects I typically like to embark upon. Storytelling has always been at the heart of what I like to do, and I’ll dive into pretty much any medium to achieve it. I studied media and filmmaking, learning photography, animation, and design along the way and in recent years, along with comics, I’ve delved deep into the world of tabletop gaming as a storytelling medium because collaboration is awesome.

If anything, my own particular brand is really just to do with the eclectic variety of directions my personal and professional life has taken me, and how I apply all this bizarre experience to try and tell the best stories I can. I’d love you to come along for the ride.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

My high school art teacher told me “cartoons are not art!” which is obviously not true, but it was a defining moment for me as a youngster who loved drawing cartoons and had no other artistic mentors in my life at the time. It set in motion a downward spiral in my love of cartoons and art in general, leading me to quit illustrative art entirely, pursuing media and live action filmmaking instead.

It took me years to unlearn that statement as if it was fact. It was years before I comfortably allowed myself to draw cartoons again, and longer still before I let go of the inner shame/judgment that I wasn’t a real artist because cartoony illustration is my main thing. Cartoon art styles ARE art just as much as anything else. They don’t have to be just for children, they don’t have to be less important, less meaningful, or less valid, and they’re not a “lower” form of art. Cartoons are great.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

I can’t *not* create things. This is more than just a casual craving. It’s not the same as just feeling in the mood to do an activity. This is an itch on a soul-level that must be scratched.

For the non-creatives in my life, and for society in general I think, the best way to justify the investment of time or money or effort into creative endeavours is to turn it into a hustle. If it’s a career choice, or a business venture then that need suddenly becomes valid in more peoples’ eyes, but the truth is that I’d do it no matter what. I’ll always make comics, or films, or games, or tell stories, even if it never earns me a penny or never sees the light of day. Recently I’ve been trying to re-engage with doing art for fun, and for the love, because it’s easy to get caught up in the pressure to commodify creative expression in order to justify it. Time has been monetized to the point where we are shamed for “wasting” it. But if you enjoyed the time you spent, then it wasn’t a waste.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.dragoones.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iddstar/
• Other: https://bsky.app/profile/iddstar.bsky.social
  https://iddstar.gumroad.com/
  www.iddstar.com