Yahoo Finance Emilia Clarke Just Went From “Mother of Dragons” to “Mother of Madness” With Her New Comic
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She was once offing slave traders as the Mother of Dragons in Game of Thrones. Now, Emilia Clarke has crafted a main character who is putting an end to sex traffickers as the Mother of Madness (a.k.a. M.O.M.). Clarke has been working on a three-part comic series titled M.O.M.: Mother of Madness, which she describes as "a lot of silliness" paired with feminist themes "explored in an extreme genre-bending atmosphere."
Clarke wrote M.O.M. alongside Marguerite Bennett for Image Comics. It follows a single mother named Maya who discovers she has superpowers and decides to use them to take down child traffickers. "We're always calling mothers superheroes, and I'm like, what if they were? What if they legitimately were superheroes?" Clarke told Entertainment Weekly in an interview published April 21st. "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."
In an April 21st Instagram post, Clarke divulged that she's been crafting M.O.M. for the past two years. "I couldn't be prouder, my girl Maya, is a badass single mom superhero," she wrote in the caption of her post. "She's funny, she's fierce and she is just a regular woman trying to figure her shit out. But with the addition of some helpful lady powers... it couldn't be more feminine, it couldn't be more fabulous."
The idea to write Maya's story in comic-format came from Clarke's realization as a child that women have often been kept out of the comic book scene—there's a general lack of female main characters, and comics are often designed and written for the male gaze.
So, Clarke's want to fill a gap in the industry with a character who sources her powers from what makes her feminine—and without having to fight crime in a skintight Lycra suit—drove her to make M.O.M. a reality. She pulled together an all-female team, including illustrator Leila Leiz, contributor Isobel Richardson, and cover artist Jo Ratcliffe, and brought Maya to fruition.
"It's been a very beautiful female experience in the creation of it, and a phenomenally creatively fulfilling process," Clarke told EW. "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."
The first of three issues of M.O.M.: Mother of Madness hits shelves on July 21st.
