Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke didn’t feel comfortable in comic shops when she was younger. She later discovered a love for comics and even wrote some herself.
Emilia Clarke, known worldwide as Mother of Dragons Daenerys Targaryen from the hit series Game of Thrones, is also active in other industries. The English-born actress has established herself as an acclaimed actress and has also discovered her creative side as a comic writer.
Together with author Marguerite Bennett (known for Batwoman and DC Bombshells) and illustrator Leila Leiz (known for Horde), she has created her own comic that turns the superhero world on its head.
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She used to not dare go to comic shops
What led you to comics? For Clarke, the path to comics wasn’t so easy. As a child, she admittedly avoided comic shops (via Carlsen). Emilia Clarke remembers that her brother was a huge comic book fan, but she wasn’t allowed to go to the shops with him because she was the little loser sister. When she was allowed into the store, she hardly saw any female characters on the covers of the comics. This made her feel insecure (via Entertainmenty Weekly).
But through her experiences with, among others, Game of Thrones and the numerous conventions she attended, that changed. Meeting fans and the atmosphere sparked her interest in comics and superheroes.
She says the following:
Well, as a child I didn’t dare follow my brother to comic shops, so I discovered comics late, actually through Daenerys, Sarah and Qi’ra. When you go to ComicCons all the time, you inevitably start reading the great comics there too, and I saw all my favorite movie characters (I’m a superhero fangirl) and it suddenly dawned on me: THIS IS COOL. […]
Emilia Clarke (Source: Carlsen) Clarke’s first comic: M.OM.: Mother of Madness
Through other comic works she came up with the core theme of her first comic. While I was looking through the works presented, I also noticed that the ratio of women and men was slightly…unbalanced, and so the seed of MOM (Carlsen) was born. MOM is a three-part miniseries from Image Comics.
What is the comic about? MOM tells the story of Maya Kuyper, a 29-year-old single mother and chemical engineer. Maya unexpectedly develops superpowers related to her hormones and her period. She fights against evil with a dystopian vision of the future of New York, shaped by her own tragic past and the challenges of life as a single mother.
What’s behind it? The story, described by Clarke as a combination of Deadpool, lots of silliness and ironic humor, conveys a strong feminist message.
We always call moms superheroes, and I wonder: What if they were? What if they were legitimately superheroes? Clarke tells Entertainment Weekly. “Maya has had a very hard life and finds herself in a place where she hates and is ashamed of everything that makes her unique. It is only in discovering her powers that she finds true acceptance of who she is.”
The idea was to flip the narrative around things women often dislike about themselves. Emilia felt excluded in her youth when she was not allowed to go to comic shops with her brother and hardly saw any female characters there. She wanted to create a female protagonist that women could identify with.
Game of Thrones ended after eight seasons with an ending that disappointed many fans. The author was also anything but satisfied: the makers of the Game of Thrones series ignored the inventor’s ideas and ultimately disappointed all the fans