Emilia Clarke-Penned Comic M.O.M.: Mother of Madness Revealed

As if the four-time Emmy nominee joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Disney+’s Secret Invasion series weren’t enough, Emilia Clarke is expanding her comic book resume as Entertainment Weekly has revealed a new comic book, M.O.M.: Mother of Madness, co-authored by the Game of Thrones alum!

Co-written by Clarke and writer Marguerite Bennett, the three-issue Image Comics miniseries centers on Maya, a single mom who learns she possesses incredible superpowers and decides to use them to take on a secret cabal of human traffickers.

“We’re always calling mothers superheroes, and I’m like, ‘What if they were? What if they legitimately were superheroes?‘” Clarke said. “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.“

The 34-year-old actress describes the tone of the comic similar to Rob Liefeld’s iconic Merc with a Mouth, Deadpool, with a “lot of silliness” and tongue-in-cheek humor that also explores the current feminist sensibility in “an extreme genre-bending atmosphere,” though she is keeping mum on the exact powers of her titular hero.

“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,” Clarke said with a laugh. “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.”

In a desire to further expand the female voice in the comics world, Clarke put together an all-female creative team with co-writer Bennett, illustrator Leila Leiz, contributor Isobel Richardson and cover artist Jo Ratcliffe, while also designing the mask of Maya’s costume to be similar to the iconic balaclavas of Russian protest punk group Pussy Riot.

M.O.M.: Mother of Madness is currently set to debut its first issue on July 21.

(Photo Credit: Mike Marsland/WireImage)