Emilia Clarke’s comics career change
The Game Of Thrones actor on writing M.O.M: Mother Of Madness, her first comic book, about a superpowered single mum
WHEN LOCKDOWN HIT last year, many actors were forced to twiddle their thumbs and wait for film shoots to crank into gear again. Not Emilia Clarke. “I’ve been busy,” she says. “Using a different part of my brain.”
By the time the pandemic hit, Clarke was already hard at work on her debut comic, M.O.M.: Mother Of Madness, a wild three-issue superhero story co-written with Marguerite Bennett and illustrator Leila Leiz. The comic imagines a single mother as an ass-kicking superhero who takes on human traffickers in New Jersey; Clarke, who spent a number of years attending Comic-con with the Game Of Thrones cast and dreamed of adding to the convention’s cosplay parade, describes her creation as “new and different and wild”. The gear shift took a bit of mental recalibration, though.
“It’s a brand spanking new experience,” Clarke says, who insisted that it had to be in this medium. “I came up with the idea very much as a comic. The two came hand-in-hand.” She laughs: “The fact that I didn’t know the first fucking thing about making comics didn’t really factor in until I started to realise, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to learn a whole new skillset!’”
With Bennett’s help, Clarke learned the sometimes painful creative process of being a writer. It is, she says, a wholly different experience from her regular day job. “As an actor, you’re joining the journey really late in the day. Your ‘day one’ is the writer’s ‘year nine’, sometimes.” The writing process, she has found, can be more brutal. “Being an author — that’s in essence what this is — you start with this really big idea and as you make it you have to start taking things away, and morphing it into something that fits the form.”
Work is complete on the comics and Clarke now must do what all creators learn to do: let it go. “Christ, a year-and-a-half ago I was full to the brim of comic-book stuff, and now it’s like, ‘Oh, baby’s taking her first steps!’ I’ve just got to stand back and kind of hope for the best. I’m now fascinated to see how people absorb this. If anyone wants to absorb this!” Clarke is now back at the day job, currently filming MCU show Secret Invasion — but if M.O.M. proves a hit, her own superhero could earn its own adaptation soon enough.