Doug Wagner & Daniel Hillyard From Plastic to Narco: Twisted Stories with a Beating Heart

Some comics make you feel something. The best ones make you feel several things at once, and leave you wondering which one you weren’t supposed to feel.

That’s the Doug Wagner and Daniel Hillyard experience.

Doug has been on Back to Pop before, and those conversations always rank among my favorites. This time, we get the full picture, writer and artist together, talking about what it actually looks like to build a creative partnership that keeps producing work this bold and this specific.

Plastic. Vinyl. Plush. I Was a Fashion School Serial Killer. These aren’t just titles. They’re a fingerprint. And now there’s Narco, unmistakably them, but with something different under the hood.

We talk about how the collaboration works at the level of instinct and shorthand. What makes something horrific also be funny. How you draw confusion and panic without losing the reader. Why damaged characters are the only kind worth following. And, what happens when readers respond to the emotional core of a book that looks, on the surface, like pure chaos.

This is a conversation about craft, about creative identity, and about why creator-owned comics still feel like the most fearless space in the medium.

Narco is out now. Go read it.

The conversation with this creative team is out now, and available wherever you get your podcast.