This post is a text version of the interview available on The World’s Greatest Comic Book Podcast. https://thecomicbookpodcast.com/2022/10/12/015-the-lane-ulrich-report-nick-cagnetti/
Chris Hoffman:
Hello and welcome. This is Chris Hoffman with the Lane/Ulrich Report for October 6th, 2022. Today my guest is Nick Cagnetti, who’s the co-founder of Radical Realm Comics and the comic book creator behind the titles Infinite Wonders, The Spirit of the Shadows, and Pink Lemonade, which is out now at your local comic book store from Oni Press. He’s currently residing out of Phoenix, Arizona, where in 2019 he was named the best comic book artist in Phoenix by the Phoenix New Times.
He’s a big Spider-Man fan, and he was introduced to me as the second coming of Mike Allred. So, Nick Cagnetti, welcome to the show.
Nick Cagnetti :
Hey, Chris, thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. Always fun talking about this stuff.
Chris Hoffman :
I always tell people that listen to the podcast or that find us at comic book conventions or at the store. This is exactly the way I would just talk. If I met you on the street, we’d have been having the same conversation. The fun thing here is just other people get to kind of be involved.
Nick Cagnetti :
Yeah, that’s great.
So that is that let’s just start there because like I said, I got a text one morning From my friend Andrew that said, you got to see this guy’s artwork. He’s literally the second coming of Michael Allred and I noticed you actually have a pull quote from him on Pink Lemonade, right?
Nick Cagnetti :
Yeah, the original printing from 2019, my publisher managed to get in front of Mike Allred and he was, you know, kind enough to say that about the book, which was like a dream come true for me because his work was honestly like one of those early instances of me as a reader, just like seeing the light, so to speak, comics can be like so much more.
It can be so much fun. I want to do stuff like that and know. So, I’ve met Mike and Laura a few times, honestly, just by happenstance, at a local convention once. But then like a decade ago I was in San Diego doing a portfolio review and I was just wearing a Madman shirt and I was falling asleep because it was taking so long.
But I was dozing off and I heard somebody say, That’s a nice shirt. I opened my eyes and it was Mike and Laura standing there and I’m just like, Oh, I just sprung up and I’m like, Thank you. I got off your shop.
Chris Hoffman :
That’s amazing. What a cool happenstance and that really makes it worth it to have that on. That’s really cool. But he’s got to have like a bead of sweat because you’re coming for him, right? I really encourage everybody, first off, to go get your copy of Pink Lemonade.
But if you get a chance, go check out Nick’s artwork on all his social media. And it is uniquely yours. There are a lot of comic book layout there that is experimenting with the style.
Nick Cagnetti :
Yeah. I mean, I definitely try to do stuff like that. You know, I wanted the character to sort of be like a vehicle for that kind of experimentation and just sort of having fun with the medium. And I think the character’s personality especially sort of makes it makes a great canvas for that sort of thing because, you know, she is a blank slate in a lot of ways, but it’s also a way for me just to wrestle with these things where, you know, I’m trying to focus on trying to reconnect with that sense of like childlike wonder and that sense of joy, that that you get from comics.
As you know, when you first discover them and you fall into these worlds, you’re full of that wonderment, and gets you to want to, dive in and make your own stuff. That’s sort of what happened to me, as a kid. So, it’s just sort of been like a big experiment in trying to capture that kind of feeling and wrestles with those sorts of things.
Because in a lot of ways I think there’s a lot of things you need to grapple with just, you know, coming from it. And as a grown-up, you see the dark corners of things creeping in and try and find a way to afloat through it all.
That really just sort of became like the driving force of the narrative is just can she stay true to herself through all these influences going around her.
Chris Hoffman :
Tell everybody a little bit about the pink lemonade and the title character.
Nick Cagnetti :
The funny thing, you know, seeing some of the reactions out there online, random reactions, I saw a lot of people saying like, I don’t know what the heck I just read, but they’re on board at least to see how that pans out. So, I think that’s kind of a fun way to describe it is you just don’t know what you read, you know.
But I think it’s just trying to capture kind of a sincere kind of quality and try and try and just try and do something a little bit more wholesome, obviously. But like I said, is this your grappling with the real-life dark corner aspects of entertainment and all the all these things that we consume just trying to maintain the heart through it all, you know?
Chris Hoffman :
Right. And so the. Yeah, and then but the, the main character Pink Lemonade dreams of doing big things and she wants to be good help where she can but things don’t always work out the way we plan.
And as soon as Pink Lemonade finds herself in jail after a big misunderstanding with some cops while trying to help a child and just when you think she’s sunk, a powerful man shows up with an offer she may not be able to refuse. But is it too good to be true?
In the opening sequence of Pink Lemonade is on a motorcycle and it looks like she’s trying to do a stunt bike thing. It harkened back to me to the old Ghost Rider comics.
Nick Cagnetti :
Yeah, totally.
Chris Hoffman :
Then dream sequences something about your artwork in here is that and it’s what evokes the Mike Allred comparisons is that there’s a lot of very bold colors, a lot of very bold lines, but also very an eye towards the storytelling. So, it’s like you said, people might be looking through it and be like, man, I was dazzled by everything in here.
How do you sort of like approach the like this, the style where it’s not a traditional superhero comic book style?
Nick Cagnetti :
Right? Well, I mean, I grew up reading obviously lots of superhero comics and love Spider-Man my whole life. So, I think part of my approach is trying to blend the love of that mainstream sort of stuff with the more independent kind of flavor and try and marry that to best I can. In my last decade or so, we’re like really getting serious about this stuff to really just try and dove in and more into the weirder corners of comics and just like just getting acquainted with and fallen in love with stuff like all of Dan Clowes’s work.
I think that and being a big influence on me, just in terms of his focus on lots of oddballs and just looking at them with sincerity and the hope for the art is just trying to capture that kind of oddball quality and just do it in a kind of sincere way.
But you know, the fun thing was doing lots of blending sort of styles and stuff, characters like that. There’s, a character in there called Ron Radical and he’s like an extreme nineties kind of parody guy and he’s always got like a backlight on them and everything. It is fairly fun just trying to like channel the inner Rob Liefeld sort of nineties charm and mix those flavors together and make it kind of all just coexist in one world.
There are a lot of random bits and bobs of different areas of comic book culture and comic book flavors in there that I wanted to try and mix together because I think the thing I’m most excited for out of all this is just sort of seeing how people are going to react to how this stuff sort of plays out.
Because, from day one, I sort of had the whole outline for this stuff altogether. I’m hoping it’s surprising in a good way because it was a labor of love and just trying to celebrate everything I love about comics and put it into as positive of a thing as I could make after doing this stuff for about a decade now, I just really tried to go for it all and do something that would really push myself and make something that I could feel more and more proud of because now on all the previous stuff I had done.
In every book I had worked on up to then, I was always seeing incremental growth. Thankfully, still, as I’m doing all this stuff, I keep seeing that growth and what I’m doing, and I’m just happy that I was able to notice at least. I mean, going into the first issue, in particular, it was important for me in my head, I got to put in as much crazy stuff in here. Things people say is hard to draw and things like that editors might be always noticing.
It was stuff like putting dogs in there and big crowds and crowded rooms of crazy objects and all kinds of things like that. I was just trying to focus on and get acquainted with it. I think that’s valuable to do is just go outside your comfort zone with what you’re forcing yourself to draw, right?
Chris Hoffman :
It’s a great idea. I always tell students and people that ask what they should draw, like get good at drawing horses if you’re an illustrator, because like every advertising agency, needs illustrations of horses. Even if the client is a bank. They probably want an illustration of a horse or horses. Like you’re saying, dogs. And that’s actually very interesting. Were you getting like feedback on your portfolio reviews before we started or are now you mentioning having, your portfolio at San Diego Comic-Con to get reviews?
Were you incorporating that sort of stuff like the crowded rooms and whatnot based on the feedback you were getting on your portfolio review?
Nick Cagnetti :
Honestly, no. About the portfolio reviews in San Diego, then they were pretty, surprisingly to me at the time, positive on my stuff and they gave me their cards, but it just wasn’t a thing that panned out. But all those things that I was internalizing, I just would be, searching for what people would be saying online, just in general. About what to try and look out for. What people are looking out for and just trying to be more conscious of things like that.
I do remember one of the pages I had in the portfolio in San Diego. There was a page of people playing croquet and it was a page with a game of croquet where the characters were sort of seething inside. That was, I think just like trying to make fun sequences out of sort of mundane things can, can be a good challenge.
Chris Hoffman :
Yeah, that’s awesome. So, the latest Pink Lemonade is being published by Oni Press right now, a very famous and long-standing publisher of indie comics. How did that relationship come about?
Nick Cagnetti :
Sort of simple as I just sort of posted on social media. It was actually my birthday like a year and a half ago. I just wrote out there because I’d just finished work on issue three at that point, and I just did not know where I was going to go with any of that stuff at that point.
So I just said, I just finished another issue. Does anybody out there want to publish it? I’m looking for a new publisher. And I got a message from one of the editors at Oni that later that day they just reached out to me and said they saw that. Are you interested? If you’re interested, just hit us up.
So it was really long in the works after that point. But, you know, it was good to get something moving on that end.
Chris Hoffman :
Your previous comics for Infinite Wonders and The Spirit of the Shadows. The Spirit of the Shadows seems like it’s a little bit more of like a horror comic.
Nick Cagnetti :
Yeah, a little bit of a horror romance book. Old school.
Chris Hoffman :
Were you really into horror comics as well as superhero ones?
Yeah, a little bit. I think the inspiration for that was just, in general, a lot of the old universal horror monster movies and things like Dr. Caligari was a big influence on The Spirit of the Shadows, just that whole German expressionist sort of styling. It was a fun experiment to really like push things because at that point that was like 20, 2015.
I was in college and it was just one of those early projects where you’re just throwing everything possible at the page just to see what works, going crazy with the layouts because you’re not confident in your drawing capabilities to try and like distract from things. It was a funny instance.
My friend who worked on that with me, Daniel, he wrote that. Somehow we were able to get a visit with Todd McFarlane here locally. He lives here and he runs his business here. We got to go into his office that year and I got to bring in pages of Spirit the Shadows because I thought that would be more up his alley with this monster stuff.
He was able to give me some tips on those pages which is really nice. He noticed right away, you got those crazy layouts, and he said the line weights. I need to do more variation in the line so immediately after that the next page I’m finally using different-sized pens to get the different weights going on.
And I was just a nice little thing that happened. But now that that book was really fun to do, the year after we actually Daniel and I made a short film with the Spirit of the Shadows, where we really liked push the German expressionistic qualities because we made little miniatures of weird buildings and such, and you couldn’t make life-sized buildings out of stuff because we’re just sitting there in the garage making these things, and that wasn’t what we could do.
So my grandma helped make me a costume and we had Christmas ribbons on it and there were wires in there. Getting poked while I was wearing this costume. So I got to dress up as a character for that project, which was no fun.
Chris Hoffman :
That sounds like it’s a lot of fun and especially getting a chance to get your grandma involved and have a have that seems like a lot. It’s a friend of yours that helps you with the comics. I always find that that’s a good recommendation for people if they’re going to make a comic or have somebody else that they’re working with. It helps with bouncing off ideas and whatnot.
Nick Cagnetti :
Yeah, totally. Even before infinite wanders the very first thing my friend Chris and I worked on in high school was a nineties parody book called Radical Force Extreme.
My art was so bad and I only got a few pages in and I just abandoned it. I think that an important thing for people is to be okay with it. Your first thing is not going to be looking great probably. You just got to keep finding those things to keep pushing yourself forward and you’ll get there.
That character in that Radical Force Extreme I got to bring that character over to Pink Lemonade. Finally, a decade later here we’re going full circle because there was really a great place for that character through the whole story, where it was sort of in a great parallel to Pink Lemonade’s journey.
That really felt right.
Chris Hoffman :
With Pink Lemonade coming out with Oni Press, I’ve noticed on your socials that you’re hitting a lot of signings at local stores. As an indie comic creator, how important are those relationships with local comic book stores? How is it that you interact differently now with the conventions that you go to? Or do you?
Nick Cagnetti :
With the books coming out they have all been really, really supportive and kind. The one place I was at just the last week, was Ash Avenue Comics over in Tempe. I was going to that shop for the last decade or so, ever since I was in high school. It’s just really cool just to be doing stuff at your shop.
This coming Saturday, I’m going to be at Atomic Comics up here in Chandler, Arizona. I’m not sure if you’re if you know the history there. They actually closed in 2011.
Chris Hoffman :
Oh, I do remember that. Yeah.
Nick Cagnetti :
They closed their doors and just last year November they reopened, finally. They reopened for business and I thought last year, boy, it would be cool if I could, do a signing at Atomic. So somehow we were able to get that going, which is really, really cool because they were the place I first went to as a little kid.
Chris Hoffman :
Like the manifesting there, right?
Nick Cagnetti :
Yeah, I didn’t think I’d be able to since they’re. They went out of business.
Chris Hoffman :
That’s great, man. Switching gears on here a little bit because we were talking earlier and you said you’re a big Spider-Man fan. It is Spider-Man’s 60th anniversary this year and I wanted to ask you a couple of questions. What’s your favorite Spider-Man storyline? Do you have one?
Nick Cagnetti :
Hmm.
Chris Hoffman :
I don’t put you on the spot.
Nick Cagnetti :
That’s a good question, though.
I can pull out some obscure ones here. I got a few potentials. I think just in general a pretty underrated Spider-Man run and era is the Paul Jenkins, Mark Buckingham, Peter Parker, Spider-Man stuff. I think they had a lot of great just standalone issues and small story arcs that just really spoke to the heart at the center of it all.
I think one of my favorites is there’s a silent issue in there, or Spider-Man is just fighting a bunch of evil mimes and it’s just really well done and a fun comic. And I think, famously that run has the Uncle Ben baseball issue is a really good one. I think Darwin Cook had some great standalone tangled web issues in there.
There’s a Valentine’s one and a Christmas one that are just really great because they highlight a lot of supporting cast members. That’s a great thing about Spider-Man is just the normal people in his life and the crazy antics they can get up to in just their day-to-day. Those issues are just really, really excellent. They sort of bring an Archie kind of feel to it. The Gwen and MJ stuff.
Chris Hoffman :
Mm-hmm.
Nick Cagnetti :
There are a few kinds of under-the-radar ones that I always really liked. There is a three-issue mini-series that Steve Reed drew that I really liked because it was Steve Root’s art and his art was super, super clean, and elegant. I like that kind of stuff. It really drew me in at a young age because, the way they had Spider-Man move in was like an acrobat, on the page, flowing, really cool, and just sort of seeing stuff like that.
What was capable on the page with a drawing like that was just really cool to see.
Chris Hoffman :
Yeah. Steve Root, did Nexus for a long time.
Nick Cagnetti :
He’s another Arizona person, apparently.
Chris Hoffman :
I can see in your artwork a lot of that flow you find inspiring.
Nick Cagnetti :
My all-time favorite issue, though, probably is amazing thirty-three. That’s probably my all-time favorite. That’s a classic story right there. The Ditko five-page sequence with him left in the rubble. The rest of that issue is just too strong because you got Spider-Man’s indomitable will to just keep going, even as he’s at his breaking point. He’s getting pummeled by all these dudes and he just doesn’t give up.
Yeah, I really like it.
Chris Hoffman :
My kids ask me who my favorite superhero is, and I always tell him it’s Spider-Man. They ask why? There are two big reasons. He’ll never give up, but he also has a good chance of losing.
Nick Cagnetti :
Yeah. I mean, I love that at the end of that issue Peter’s just all bruised and all bandaged up. Then he’s just walking out there alone, sad, and just facing the world still.
Chris Hoffman :
Do you have a favorite villain?
Nick Cagnetti :
Hmm. I might have to go with either Mysterio or the Hobgoblin. The original had the one right around your neck. I always really like Mysterio just of the potential there on the page for doing all sorts of fun stuff. I think there’s a really good, underrated, mysterious story that Jim Dean Mattis wrote and I think Michael Zula illustrated.
It was where the Spinners tales the Spider-Man. They had a little story with Mysterio, and he has Jonah Jamison thinking he had died and is in hell. Then there’s like a spider demon. They’re torturing them. It’s just really fun stuff like inventive, mysterious stuff.
Chris Hoffman :
I did also like in the movie how they did the sort of crazy stuff with Mysterio.
Nick Cagnetti :
Cool.
Chris Hoffman :
They took their opportunity to really flex their muscles with him and do something that felt like the Mysterio on the page.
Nick Cagnetti :
Sequences that everybody sort of dreams about seeing, you know?
Chris Hoffman :
They should have had a little bit more of that in the Doctor Strange movie. It also feels like it would have been at home there. A lot of the stuff in Doctor Strange, they were just like shooting lightning bolts at each other.
Nick Cagnetti :
I would agree. I 100% like that. Of course, I would like to see more things just go weirder and wilder because that’s what they’re they should be pulling from. That’s the source right there. Doctor Strange books are just full of insane imagery and just generally most Doctor Strange books are.
I want to see that level of fidelity just reflected back on the screen if they’re doing stuff with those.
Chris Hoffman :
They kind of touched on that in the Doctor Strange one when they were kind of blurring through those several realities and the one where they were made out of paint.
It was like, yeah, do that. That’s something we want that some more. I understand. Like you’re blowing a lot of the effects budget there, you know what I mean?
Nick Cagnetti :
Right. I mean, that’s just my kind of approach in general with this all this sort of stuff is just you can go like really weird and crazy with this stuff. You just really believe in what you’re saying. I think, as a result, people will well, believe it, too, if the love and the care are there.
I think a big thing that I’ve noticed that I’ve been focusing on is a lot of these ideas, they might be kind of silly, the O.J. Bar, for example. That the funny story with that thing is it was born out of a spelling error in a text I sent to my friend Daniel nine years ago. I texted him and I was writing “Oh, boy!” but I wrote “OJ bar.” instead.
It stuck in my head ever since then and been trying to get the character’s end of things. But a lot of ideas everybody would be telling me that’s too silly. We can’t do that. I’m just like thinking to myself, Oh, I’ll hold on to this. Don’t you worry. As you go along, you sort of ascribed stories to these things in your head and it gives them greater meanings. Telling those stories so other people can find out about them too.
Chris Hoffman :
You can tell in your artwork that you’re having a lot of fun. I think the authenticity of your book is helping connecting to the readers.
Nick Cagnetti :
I’m glad to hear that. I’m really eager, I keep saying the old issues one and two came out previously and I’ve been holding on to so much work that I’m really excited about.
Issue three is all the new stuff that nobody in the world has seen yet and that was all done in 2020. I’m sitting on like two years of comics here. All of the hopeful progress that I’ve made in the craft. I’m excited for people to see that side of it and just see where the story beats go.
I think it should be surprising in good ways because I was hoping to try and make something that would touch on our landscape and where we are with the way we were consuming all this entertainment. There’s so much comic book and superhero stuff around us nowadays.
I want to try and reflect on that little bit and like come at it from a certain angle.
Chris Hoffman :
We’re excited about that. I’m excited to see the new work because your continuous improvement has shown through the different works through the Spirit of the Shadows and through Infinite Wonders. Now what I’ve seen of Pink Lemonade and what I’ve seen of that blew my mind. Now that there’s other stuff that’s an improvement from there.
That’s exciting. The upcoming issues of Pink Lemonade, that’s the near future. What’s more of the far future for Nick Canetti? Do you have your sights set on a bigger publisher? Just kind of seeing where this is leading you?
Nick Cagnetti :
Well, a little bit of all of those things. I’d say I’m at the moment. I’m just mainly focusing on finishing up the final issue of the series here. It’s the six issues. Then I’m almost done on issue six here. So just trying to bring it all home with a nice, tidy bow on top. I’m thinking about the next thing for sure, but I’m also thinking I would like to work on some licensing stuff at some point.
That would be cool. Obviously, Spider-Man’s is pinnacle goal where someday you do something with Spider-Man. I’d like to do some video game stuff like Tomb Raider. I think there are a lot of really good fun Tomb Raider comics, but I think I could do something different with that right?
The podcast “Amazing Spider Talk” had me do title cards for them where I get to go through the history of the comics. They were around the Roger Stern run. I’ve been getting to interpret sort of in my own way some of those stories as big title cards and that was just fun to do, just sort of like as a side thing.
Chris Hoffman :
That sounds like a lot of fun. When you’re on one of those books, I’ll be able to say, I met you back when. People can go to their local comic book store and they could get Pink Lemonade right now. If your local store doesn’t have it, make sure they order it.
Nick Cagnetti :
Yep. They’re in Previews and Lunar catalogs too. You can get them on the Oni Press website and they’re they just went up on Comixology.
Chris Hoffman :
If you’re in a research station somewhere in northern Alaska, you can still enjoy Pink Lemonade on your iPad up there, depending on how your internet connection is.
Nick Cagnetti :
Thanks for that, because I was hoping to get those on digital for a while now, and thankfully they’re out there.
Chris Hoffman :
Our listeners are all bought in now. Where’s the best place to connect with you and then follow your work in your journey through conquering comic books?
Nick Cagnetti :
Probably my Instagram or Twitter or Facebook pretty much all over the place. The Radical Realm comics website, too, is just sort of a hub for all my comic book work. My Instagram is @fudgy1nick.
Chris Hoffman :
Awesome. Thank you so much for spending some time with me and talking about your comics and Spider-Man and I wish you the best of luck. I and everyone will be watching all of your success with great anticipation.
Nick Cagnetti :
I appreciate it Chris thanks for having me on. Hope everybody enjoys the ride with pink lemonade because should be a pretty wild one.
