After reports broke yesterday that Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke is joining a Marvel Comics television adaptation, the actress announced today that she’s working on a brand new comic book project. Image Comics will publish M.O.M.: Mother of Madness, a three-issue series co-written by Clarke and Marguerite Bennett, with art by Leila Leiz and Isobel Richardson and covers from Jo Ratcliffe. The comic follows a single mother named Maya, who discovers she possesses strange powers and uses them to battle human traffickers in a story that Clarke compares to Deadpool for its combination of “silliness” and “extreme genre-bending atmosphere,” but with a feminist touch.
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“We’re always calling mothers superheroes, and I’m like, what if they were? What if they legitimately were superheroes?” Clarke tells 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.
“There’s many, many things that she can do that are pretty cool. She can do a lot of stuff at certain moments in her month. 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.”
Clarke shared a bit of her history with the comic book medium. She recalls her brother being a comic book fan but never allowing his “loser little sister” to go into the comic book store with him. That almost didn’t matter as Clarke didn’t find the subculture particularly welcoming to women at the time. Having been to a few Comic-Cons now, she thinks things have changed and wants to leave her mark.
“It’s been a very beautiful female experience in the creation of it, and a phenomenally creatively fulfilling process,” Clarke says. “But the biggest reason why I wanted to make this comic is because I wanted young girls to look at a woman that was fallible. Obviously, you’re seeing that a lot in the industry; you’ve got all of these incredibly empowering female shows. But I just felt like I hadn’t seen it in this genre.
“I think back to my younger self and I think, if I was allowed in that comic book store, and I got to see a version that I felt like I could relate to on some level, I would have been absolutely in,. It’s a very personal experience that everyone has with comics. These are characters that people are passionate about, and care about deeply, and relate to. I wanted to throw a new character into the mix, and see if people related to her in a way that was impactful to them.”
What do you think? Let us know in the comments. M.O.M.: Mother of Madness #1 goes on sale on July 21st.
