Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s … a menstruating single mother?
That’s the premise of Emilia Clarke’s upcoming new comic book, anyway. The “Game of Thrones” star — she played mother of dragons Daenerys Targaryen — is moving away from the fantasy world and into the realm of superheroes with her new offering, which is due for release next month.
“M.O.M. Mother of Madness” will center on a single mother whose powers manifest while she is menstruating. “The bloating, the hair growth, the mood swings, the [acne], all of it. We hate that when it happens, speaking for myself and everyone I’ve ever met who has had a period,” she told Variety. But “what if we turned that around and made the period something that we can feel as this unique, crazy, superhuman thing that happens in our body?”
Indeed, when titular character Maya has her period, her anxiety becomes the power of invisibility; her anger becomes super-strength; she even gains the ability to “swing like Spider-Man from her armpit hair.”
In addition to lifting up single mothers through this new character, Clarke also wants to increase representation for women in the comic book world — both as heroes, and as creators, since the entire team behind “M.O.M. Mother of Madness” is comprised of women.
Her previous work cast an especially bright light on the disparity, she recalls. “[W]hen I went to Comic-Con for the first time at 22 with ‘Game of Thrones,’ I was amazed at what I saw — almost entirely men,” she says. “Later, as tides turned in the industry and #MeToo emerged, I began to look at the community through those eyes and it was arresting.”
And when it comes to comic books in particular, she and her team are definitely in the minority — as of 2018, just 16 percent of creators were women.
Looks like this comic book is coming to our rescue in more ways than one.
