Emilia Clarke Wrote a Comic Book with a Single Mom Superhero

From Mother of Dragons to Mother of Madness. “Game of Thrones” star Emilia Clarke just revealed that she’s co-written a comic book.

M.O.M.: Mother of Madness will be released later this summer. It follows a single mother named Maya who discovers she has supernatural powers.

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

Clarke describes the comic as “a lot of silliness” with tongue-in-cheek humor. While she hasn’t yet said what Maya’s powers are, she’s revealed they stem from her womanhood.

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“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.”

Clarke says that growing up, she loved comic books. But she didn’t really see a place for herself within the stories.

“My brother was a comic nerd [growing up], and I wasn’t allowed in the shops!” she said. “I wasn’t allowed to go in with him, because I was the loser little sister. And the moments that I was allowed in, there weren’t a lot of women on the covers, and there weren’t a lot of women in the shops. So I didn’t feel safe to explore it at that age.

“Cut to me at Comic-Con, and I’m there going, ‘I’m still not seeing a lot of women. I’m still not seeing women that aren’t in Lycra reflected back at me,'” Clarke added. “Are there any women out there that are superpowered, but aren’t in a skintight costume? Not that I can see.”

So Clarke joined forces with writer Marguerite Bennett and an all-female creative team to make M.O.M.

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“It’s been a very beautiful female experience in the creation of it, and a phenomenally creatively fulfilling process,” Clarke told ET. “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.”

We love this: We want our sons and daughters to grow up with superheroes of all genders, backgrounds, sizes and colors. We want them to be able to see themselves (and maybe their moms!) as heroes, too. Representation matters—and we can’t wait to see Maya take on some bad guys while raising her son.

M.O.M.: Mother of Madness is a three-issue miniseries from Image Comics. The first issue comes out on July 21.