Halloween season is here! It is that time of year when the witches come out to play, so what better time to shed light on a story of witches, their mysterious rituals, and their endless attempts to raise demons, wreak some havoc, and… find love?
Earlier this year, I attended San Diego Comic-Con as The Game of Nerds’ press representative, and I interviewed three individual authors with ties to the global storytelling platform WEBTOON. In the short time I attended SDCC, I interviewed three remarkable women with three incredibly unique stories that have hit physical store shelves in the past year alone, and I am here to tell you all about them and their stories. To read my previous interviews, you can click here to read my in person interview with the creator of the romantasy series Suitor Armor, Purpah. Likewise, you can click here to read my interview with the creator of the lighthearted fantasy series Castle Swimmer, Wendy Martin.
Last but not least, I interviewed Seattle area-based comic artist, animator, and layout designer Miranda Mundt, creator of the polyamorous sapphic supernatural romance series Muted. As a webcomic originally, the Muted series spanned from March 2019 to March 2022, cultivating a sizable audience and loyal fanbase with its LGBTQIA+ representation, strong female leads, otherworldly traditions, and its wonderfully complex witch family drama. Three years later, in early July, the Ten Speed Press imprint Ten Speed Graphic released the first physical copy, Muted: Volume 1, to bookstore shelves.
Containing the first 27 episodes of Miranda Mundt’s hit webtoon, Muted: Volume One focuses on the young witch Camille Severin, who dreads returning to her old home deep in the swamps of Louisana. But with her wealthy family deeply ingrained in tradition, Camille is expected to perform a ritual that summons a wish-granting demon on her twenty-first birthday. Like everyone else in her family, Camille is expected to wish for a wealthy man to marry and keep the family affluent and in power, but she isn’t interested in their wealth nor interested in men. Despite her doubts and unwillingness to marry a man for money and power, Camille performs the blood ritual and it fails, setting her on new entirely new and unexpected course.
Composed of 313 pages, Muted: Volume One also includes a never-before-seen bonus chapter that takes place in the week time skip at the beginning of episode 7. If YOU want to read what happened in that originally unpublished chapter, consider purchasing a physical copy online or at your local mainstream bookstore. Readers and fans of Miranda Mundt can expect another bonus in Muted: Volume 2, which is available now for pre-order and set to hit bookstore shelves on October 14 this year!
Composed of almost 300 pages and containing episodes 28-50, Muted: Volume Two continues to focus on Camille Severin, experiencing her first bits of freedom away from her controlling and commanding Aunt Athalie. But her freedom is cut short when she receives a call bringing news of an arranged marriage she never wanted, nor asked for. Refusing the loss of her newfound freedom, she defies the proposed marriage and fractures her relationship with her cousin Avaline in the process. With the plant demon she summoned, Dendro, Camille, along with the charming Nyra, must uncover hard truths about her family and save Avaline from Aunt Athalie’s influence.
In this SDCC exclusive interview, fan-favorite creator Miranda Mundt talks about the original inspiration for and eventual evolution of Muted as a series, her creative background with animation and storytelling, and her involvement with other recognizable authors sharing ties with WEBTOON. Mundt also shares about her transition from digital to traditional publishing, offers great thanks to the fans that have stuck by her since the conclusion of her comic in 2022, and welcomes any new fans looking to explore the mystical world of Muted. If YOU want to learn more about Mundt and how her webcomic went into print three years after its original conclusion, keep reading!
Miranda, what can you tell us about yourself and your creative projects?
Originally, I was going into animation, so that’s what I went to school for. I went to school in Vancouver, Canada, for animation back in 2011, and learned a lot. I learned to draw quickly, which is obviously very important and helpful for making comics. But I was also very stuck on the concept of telling my own stories, and with animation, it takes a very, very long time and takes a lot of people. I asked myself, ‘How do I make my own stories in a reasonable amount of time?’ And so comics felt like the perfect voice. In an ideal world, Muted would eventually become an animated series, but who knows what the future holds. There’s nothing specifically planned for in that regard, but it would certainly be fun. Then, there was my other comic, a Sci-fi called LoveBot, which I did with my wife, Chase, and finished in 2024. Currently, we’re in the process of brainstorming future ideas, but nothing specific has been finalized yet.
I’m glad you brought up the idea of making Muted into an animated series. With webcomics, comic books, and graphic novels becoming so hugely popular nowadays, some stories have been picked up and announced for live-action and animation. With Muted: Volume One officially in print and the second volume releasing soon, would you work towards an animated series if given the opportunity?
Ideally, I hope so. Muted, and its style is so specific to me that I don’t want to be too specific about how that project would look. I studied 2D animation, but 2D animation isn’t super popular or commonly used anymore. For me, something in the vein of the Tangled animated series would look really nice. With live-action, I imagine a producer would go, ‘Um, Dendro seems a little complicated to make, so let’s merge them with Nyra into one person so we don’t have to worry about all these plant effects.’ That’s my literal nightmare, an executive figuring out how to make it look ‘good’ in live-action. An animated series in 3D would be kind of okay, but ideally, a 2D series would be best. The only exception would be a stage play musical, like a Little Shop of Horrors with Dendro, because I have a huge thing about animated musicals.
With Muted: Volume One released, how does it feel to have a physical copy on bookstore shelves?
It’s very exciting and also just sort of like jarring to realize just how much work I’ve done. Because Volume One only encapsulates 27 episodes of the entire 125-episode series, and so I’m just like, ‘Oh, this isn’t even even a fifth of it, and it’s 320 pages if you don’t count the bonus pages. So it’s just like, oh, I did a lot of work.’ But it’s also very exciting just because it finished in 2022, but people are still so excited, remembering it, and want physical copies. And so the fact that people remember it on top of being able to invite it to a new audience is very exciting.
Yes, Muted officially concluded on WEBTOON in 2022, and now it’s 2025, and it’s coming out in physical form. What prompted it to go into print three years later?
It’s actually a funny story. The agent I ended with approached me when Muted was still going, but at the time, doing the webtoon itself was taking so much mental focus. I couldn’t physically focus on doing that and worrying about how it would look in print at the same time, so I chose to focus on the digital comic. It was just a matter of luck that Ten Speed wanted to put it into print. Ultimately, I’m very grateful that they looked at it and were, like, ‘I can see why people would still want to read this,’ and took a chance on it.
Now in print, with a second physical volume incoming soon, Muted was initially launched in 2019 as a webcomic via WEBTOON. What originally led you to use WEBTOON as a platform to publish your comics?
That’s a funny story because back in 2016, my wife, Chase, and I were working on a traditionally laid-out comic called Siren that we posted on a now nonexistent website called Smack Jeeves. We were posting, but then work and capitalism got in the way, so I had to take a break. A few years later, I picked up comic-making and asked myself, ‘Where do people even post comics anymore?’ I literally just Googled ‘top places to post a webcomic,’ and WEBTOON was top of the list, so I clicked on it. Back then, Lore Olympus had just re-launched in 2018. It was originally on CANVAS, where I had initially seen it. I started scrolling episodes and thought, ‘This is kind of cool.’ I considered it like storyboarding for animation in a way because you can control the negative space in a sort of animated-esque way that you can’t normally do on the page.
Next, I thought, ‘Yeah, let’s give this a try,’ and immediately after I posted the first episode, they announced the 2018 WEBTOON Contest, so I pulled down the episode and then reuploaded it into the contest. I didn’t place in the contest at all, but I got an honorable mention. Then, a month later, my editor reached out and said, ‘I liked your stuff. Would you like to be a WEBTOON ORIGINALS creator?’ And was, like, ‘Yeah!’
How did working directly with a platform like WEBTOON, or a publisher like Ten Speed, affect you as a creator?
A lot of my friends have the diligence to post so many times per week to reach their audience. That’s how they do it, that’s what they’re at, and that’s very amazing. But for me, I was getting paid to do this, so I sat down because it’s my job now. I got to focus on this, so reminding myself that it was my job now really helped expedite the process. You have so much to do in a short amount of time, and I don’t think it’s a workflow that everyone can keep up with. But pursuing animation taught me to draw quickly, and it helped me a lot in that regard.
Who, or what, would you argue inspired your storytelling style?
I’m a very big anime girly, but I also grew up with Disney musicals. I love both because they both come with big emotions. You can’t have a musical in a comic book, but Muted comes with big emotions, and when you have so much emotion, you can’t do anything else but sing! I enjoy a subtle performance as much as the next guy, but people having loud emotions is a lot more intriguing to me. I like it when things are a bit more melodramatic. I’d also say that hanging out with my wife, since we bounce ideas back and forth. We’ve known each other since eighth grade, so our minds are, like, harmonized in that department.
As an accomplished creator and published author, what would you say to any aspiring creators looking to publish or just start their projects?
The key is starting, for sure. I always worry these sorts of questions are too technical or broad, but if you’re looking to get published and want more technical advice, you have to do enough work to show to mean you mean business. Prepare a whole pitch to query an agent, and how to query an agent can be Googled these days. You’ve also gotta be prepared to be rejected by a lot of agents because there are lots of people out there trying to get agents.
If you’re just starting, post your work online however you like, and posting through Patreon, WEBTOON CANVAS, your own website, or simply social media are good examples of where to start. I know that it’s hard in this day and age because I started posting on DeviantArt where I would get one star on something I posted and go, ‘Yippee!’ I know it’s harder these days when numbers are so obvious that you feel like when you’re posting and your post flops or fails, you think, ‘Oh no, I’m a failure.’ But it really takes time. Like I said, I’ve been doing this since before 2011. If you love your idea and wanna make it real, you gotta do it and keep grinding.
Your original webcomic, Muted, ran from March 2019 to March 2022. How would you argue Muted and its characters evolved over the course of three solid years?
I think it evolved into something way bigger than I had imagined. I already knew where it would end, and often, the biggest change was, well, the introduction of a couple of characters that weren’t originally in the CANVAS version. With Avaline, her role was originally meant to stay or be much more antagonistic for much longer, but as I was writing her, I was also reading the comments and saw how people were reacting. In the end, it worked out for the best, and it flowed pretty naturally. In fact, the part where it actually focuses more on her was not originally planned. It was supposed to be mostly from Camille’s POV the entire time, but I grew attached to Avaline and her specific journey, and I wanted to dig deeper into that situation. A lot of her episodes and her overall growth ended up being kind of my favorite in the entire series, to be honest, and she ended up being my favorite character.
What would you argue was the main inspiration behind Muted, and what drove you to tell this particular story?
Like I said earlier, Chase and I had known each other since eighth grade, and we had been writing stories together all that time. We had literally hundreds of characters on the shelves. But Muted came from us being like, ‘We have a lot of characters, but we don’t have any lesbian characters despite being lesbians.’ Plus, we lacked witches. We had lots of characters with magic, sure, but not specifically witches, despite us being witchy people. Originally, Muted was a concept that we were going to do together. We created boards on Pinterest for all the families, but when I drew Camille and her original concept art, we realized we were going in very different directions. I worked on Muted solo, but we came together when it came to LoveBot. In the end, Muted came about because we wondered, ‘Why don’t we have any lesbian witches?’
What was the process of translating Muted into print from a technical standpoint?
When I was originally querying to get Muted published in print, I created initial test pages and showed these pages to my creator friends. My friends ended up getting book deals before me and asked me to format their books. The released physical copies of I’m The Grim Reaper, Not So Shoujo Love Story, Covenant, and Suitor Armor were all formatted by me. There’s more down the line, but I can’t talk about those yet. I had already formatted a couple of books by the time my Muted contract was set in stone.
As part of the technical process, I put the panels vaguely on a PDF page, so I know what panels go on which page. Then, I got into Photoshop, because that’s the professional software to use, and then I put them all into little boxes and redraw the backgrounds. Then, I take those files into InDesign, where all the text and bubbling is done. Lastly, I send all of that to my publisher for approval and edits, and they come back with anything that they need me to change before it hits the page.
Since Muted concluded as a webcomic in 2022, have you been working on any other projects since then?
LoveBot began publishing in 2020, so I was working simultaneously on it along with my Muted series. But, after an extended hiatus, LoveBot concluded in 2024. I was also producing the layouts I previously mentioned, but I admittedly ran the engine a little too hard and off the rails a bit. In the last few weeks, though, I have been itching to make comics again. I’m getting my toes in the water right now by doing a little six-page witch anthology (not written by me).
With Muted: Volume One released and Volume Two set to hit store shelves by October 14 this year, can fans of your work anticipate Volume Three to be announced any time soon?
We can hope. Muted was thankfully and very generously loved and beloved by the people who were reading it originally on WEBTOON, but as of now, the economy is tough. Things that people adore and love don’t necessarily get continued every time, and the original contract was just for the first two books. But hopefully, later on in the year, I’ll have good news to share about volume three. Until then, we’ll wait and see.
Lastly, with Muted: Volume Two releasing on October 14 this year, what would you say to past, present, and future fans?
Thank you. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. I never imagined that Muted would touch as many people as it did, that it would help people work through their own issues with identity and messy situations with their own families. It really means a lot, and I hope to continue making stories that emotionally resonate with people, even a fraction as much as people have given their time and energy to Muted. Thank you for supporting my journey, and thank you for reading.
