The Mafia Nanny has absolutely enchanted fans since its release on Webtoon in 2023, accumulating 158 million views and 3.6 million subscribers and counting over the last two years with its charming cast of characters and gripping mafia romance. With two successful seasons wrapped up, The Mafia Nanny is now looking at a whole new avenue of success with its first-ever print release by Webtoon Unscrolled finally hitting shelves on February 4th, 2025.
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As fans can finally get their hands on the physical copy of the series, ComicBook recently got the opportunity, courtesy of Webtoon, to chat with The Mafia Nanny‘s author, Violet Matter about the print release of The Mafia Nanny Volume 1, the inspiration behind the series’ widely loved characters, and even what fans can expect in the upcoming season.
ComicBook: This is your first print release as a creator, how does it feel to reach a whole new audience that is not just the readers on Webtoon but also fans of your work who may now become bonafide collectors of The Mafia Nanny?
Violet Matter: It’s kind of surreal. Webtoon Unscrolled did an amazing job with the print adaptation. I’ve been overseas lately. My fans know I move a lot. But everyone has sent me photos of the book that they spot in the wild whether it’s in a bookstore or Big-box stores, and it makes my heart just burst knowing that what we worked so hard on the whole team is like out there in actual bookstores and someone who doesn’t even read webcomics might stumble across it.
I can’t wait to go back to the US and see it myself but I hope that if it finds readers who are new to webcomics, it just opens a new door for them, entertainment-wise because there are so many good titles on Webtoon, and it’s pretty cool that they can now reach unsuspecting bystanders in the wild.
Talking about your previous experience as a creator, you have some experience as a fanfiction writer. How has your experience as a fanfiction writer shaped your creative process and story writing with The Mafia Nanny?
Yes, I came up on fanfiction and it taught me so much about writing for the audience that you have. When you write a book, which I like to do as well, you kind of write it in a vacuum, nobody sees it until it’s done. But writing serials like fanfiction and webcomics which update every week, it lets you check in with the readers as the story is still evolving and that can be a double-edged sword sometimes but I like to see it as a benefit because if something doesn’t land the way we thought it would or if it doesn’t make sense, the readers took it a completely different direction, it’s good to know that so you can keep the audience in mind while you’re kind of steering the ship cause everyone’s on the ship, so if they’re all getting seasick I want to know.
But it’s also great for encouraging I think us as the writer and the artists to sort of elaborate on or feature characters that we didn’t even think were going to hit a chord, like Adam for instance, was initially a very minor character and his background in Formula 1 was just kind of in the background for us to know and then we ended up doing a whole mini-arc featuring that side of him because readers just loved him every time he was on the page and so yeah, I think serials are really special because you can really ensure that everyone’s enjoying the series and you can kind of adapt on the fly and adlib a little bit too and there’s some back and forth there and I think I learned to do that while writing fanfiction.
If so, can fans maybe expect to see more of Valentine and Nico in the upcoming seasons?
Definitely, yes I think now that we’ve been cleared for a new season, we have a little bit more room to play with some of the side characters and the subplots that weren’t really featured that much in the original outline when we thought maybe we’d have maybe one season maybe two seasons. Yes, it’s very exciting that now we get to kind of expand on the world and keep making it incrementally bigger.
Talking more about the main characters, particularly Davina, Davina’s a very headstrong character. Was there anything you had in mind while creating her character?
VM: Davina’s character was sort of a product of where I knew the comic needed to go, actually. Usually, when I write, I start with a character in my head, but in this series, I started with an ending. I knew where I wanted the entire plot to end up, and I knew Davina had to be a certain type of woman to achieve that ending, and so she’s clever, she’s compassionate, she’s brave, she has something to prove, and she’s a computer whiz because I think in the future all heroes will wear blue-light filtering lenses, the world just becoming so connected, and so I wanted her to be able to hold her own on the cutting edge of the criminal underworld realistically, and a lot of crime happens online these days.
So, I sort of built her character backwards from a finish line focus of the entire story’s arc. It’s a little unconventional but a lot of her day-to-day comes from my nannying days in London actually, so whenever she’s doing very normal nanny things with Mikey like baking cookies and stuff I just think about what I used to do with the kids I looked after and the games we played and activities we’d do and so when I’m writing an episode I’ll be like, “Okay, today they’re going to the zoo!” I think the mundane aspect really grounds her character in terms of the more fantastical or exaggerated parts of it as well. So yeah, I wanted to give both sides, I guess—the nanny, and the cool operative.
The day-to-day mundane stuff, it’s one of the big draws of the series, you have the high-stakes mafia stuff, but then you also have the fun slice-of-life stuff with Mikey, and Mikey’s really just the star of the show at times. What inspired you when you were creating Mikey’s character and was there anything you kept in mind?
I have six younger siblings, and four of them were born when I was in high school, so initially, a lot of what went into Mikey was just memories of my little brothers and sisters when they were growing up, because I was always surprised by the topics they would bring up and their perspective on things. I think kids are a lot smarter than we give them credit for and they see more than we would like them to see definitely and so I wanted to bring that kind of hyperfocus that kids can have and use it to shine a spotlight on what’s wrong with this family that Davina needs to come in and help with.
I took some inspiration from Humor Me, a comic by Marvin.W and then I love musicals so there’s also a little bit of Annie, a little bit of Matilda, for sure. I love a kid who stands up to adults, you know, because we spend so much time as adults to raise children who do the opposite. Well okay, I say that, but actually, I became a mom this year, and I have to say my baby is a natural tyrant. I may have a Mikey in the making, and in real life maybe it’s not so great, but he makes an excellent character.
It’s easy to see why Gabriel’s so smitten with him, and in the moments when they’re together at the park feeding ducks, he just becomes a completely different person. Talking about Gabriel, he’s gorgeous, but he’s also really complex and his character really starts to take shape halfway into Season 1 and throughout Season 2. Where do you see Gabriel’s character headed particularly in Season 3 as Davina attempts to uncover things?
Yeah, It’s really fun to write Gabriel because he does start from almost a caricature. On the surface he’s everything you’d expect from the genre—stone-cold mafia, and then you just start putting little cracks in the facade. It always feels like I’m making a sculpture, like I’m deconstructing him almost as the arc goes on. So he starts off with this impenetrable aura of super intense, defensive, hot, and then you realize, he just humors his son to an absolute fault and he has a weakness for pistachio ice cream, and he’s an absolute simp for capable, intelligent women.
So, Gabriel’s arc is very much about him rising to meet Davina’s expectations, whereas at the beginning of the story, it seemed like it would be the other way around. I thought it would be fun for their dynamic to inverse from Davina trying to impress him to him having to actually change to be worthy of her, because she challenges him to be better as both a father and then later on, as a man. And so, there’s a lot of pressure on Gabriel throughout the next season I think, because he’s got a long way to go.
Particularly in the romance department with Adam becoming Cupid and giving him hints on how to improve in that particular area.
He needs all the help he can get.
That he does. Is there anything else that you can share with readers on what to expect for Season 3?
Plenty of action. I don’t know if it’ll be the action people are looking for… No there’s definitely going to be romance, probably. It’s a really slow burn. Basically, Season 3 is all about Davina’s plan, which is, her Phase One was “identify all the threats,” and then Phase Two is just neutralizing them at every turn, so we’re deep into that phase throughout Seasons 2 and 3. She’s got to deal with the Bratva, the Galecians, the mob, the don—everybody, but she can handle it. Whether or not she can handle Gabriel getting serious… we’ll see.
Having your work published on a platform like Webtoon alongside so many other creators, are there any other series on Webtoon that excite you, or inspire you, that you personally keep up with?
I’m in a cozy romance phase right now, so I completely binged Eaternal Nocturnal over the holidays. The art style just made me swoon for that one. I am reading Love 4 a Walk— the angst hits so hard… and A Spell for a Smith. I just started that one and it’s so cozy and cute and it makes you want to plant a garden and get a cat. Basically, it’s just a romance, and the main characters are just completely gone for each other—I’m obsessed. I think the next thing I write will have to feature that kind of a softer love story for sure.
Lastly, for those interested in picking up a physical copy of The Mafia Nanny, is there anything they can look forward to in the volume in terms of goodies, features, or bonus illustrations?
For this first volume, I think readers should expect the original story that they already know and love. There were a few changes made to streamline the physical version, but it should be mostly true to the online version. But for the next volume, we might sneak in some bonus sketches or something. I have to talk to the artists and see what we can come up with.
You can follow Violet Matter on X (formerly Twitter) for the latest updates.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You can contact Merlyn directly on X.
Volume 1 of The Mafia Nanny is now available on Amazon, Target, Walmart, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Indigo, and Indiebound.
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