Emilia Clarke Is Releasing A Comic With A Single Mom Superhero
Actress Emilia Clarke reveals she’s been working on a superhero comic she calls feminine and fabulous
The Mother of Dragons is now the Mother of Madness. Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke has revealed she’s spent the past two years working on a comic book series called M.O.M.: Mother of Madness, and it’s getting ready to drop this summer. Clarke gave fans a glimpse at the cover on Instagram and shared some details on the story, which sound unlike almost anything we’ve ever seen before in the superhero genre.
For starters, Clarke’s main character Maya is a single mother. “We’re always calling mothers superheroes, and I’m like, what if they were? What if they legitimately were superheroes?” Clarke said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “Maya has had a very hard life, and she finds herself in a place where everything that makes her unique, she hates and is ashamed about. It’s only in the discovery of her powers that she finds her true acceptance of who she is.”
And speaking of those superpowers—they derive from an unlikely source. “She can do a lot of stuff at certain moments in her month,” Clarke said. “She can do all of these wicked things, but they all come from the fact that she is a woman who has a menstrual cycle. I thought it would be cool to have all the things that women don’t like about themselves, flip that, and make those the things that make her superhuman.” Why go through the trouble of mining vibranium or injecting Super Soldier serum when you’ve already got PMS? Definite points for creativity there, and a million more points for helping to destigmatize periods.
Clarke said she was inspired by her own lifelong love of comics, sharing with EW that she felt like she wasn’t allowed to enjoy them as a child because she was a girl. She said that feeling persisted even as an adult as she saw how male-dominated the genre continues to be. “Are there any women out there that are superpowered, but aren’t in a skintight costume? Not that I can see.” Clarke said she asked herself. Answer: no, not many. Apparently the people who typically write and draw comics think curves and cleavage are necessary crime-fighting tools.
Mother of Madness is planned as a three-issue series right now. Fans who felt like the ending of Game of Thrones did Daenerys dirty could get a chance to see what a strong female character can do when another strong female creator is calling the shots. In fact, there’s a whole slate of them—Clarke chose an all-female creative team to collaborate with her on the project.
Clarke’s Instagram followers are already clamoring to get their hands on the comic. “I’m eager to read it as a single mother of [a] boy with severe autism,” one wrote. “I like to believe I have some superpowers too.” The wait is just a few months longer: the first issue is set to hit stores on July 21.
