EW: It started almost as a joke, Emilia Clarke recalls: “About three years ago, I was in a car with a bunch of friends and was like, ‘Hey, guys, wouldn’t it be really funny if…’ And then I woke up the next day and was like, ‘That would be funny. That would be f—ing cool. Why not?'”

And thus M.O.M.: Mother of Madness was born. The three-issue Image Comics miniseries, written by Clarke (along with writer Marguerite Bennett, who she calls her “comic guru”), follows a single mom named Maya who discovers she possesses freakish superpowers, and uses them to take on a secret cabal of human traffickers.

Clarke describes the comic as a Deadpool-esque blend of “a lot of silliness” and tongue-in-cheek humor, combined with a very current feminist sensibility “explored in an extreme genre-bending atmosphere.”

“We’re always calling mothers superheroes, and I’m like, what if they were? What if they legitimately were superheroes?” the Game of Thrones star tells EW. “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 is deliberately vague about those powers — “There’s many, many things that she can do that are pretty cool,” she cryptically teases — but not about their source. “She can do a lot of stuff at certain moments in her month,” Clarke says 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.”

It’s fitting: M.O.M.’s origins are rooted in Clarke’s history as a self-described “fangirl” of superhero comics and movies, who often felt shut out of that world because of her gender — in some cases, literally.

“My brother was a comic nerd [growing up], and I wasn’t allowed in the shops!” the actress recalls. “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.”
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