Review by Frank Plowright

There’s so often a sense of trepidation on cracking open a graphic novel written, or in this case co-written, by a celebrity. So few are creatively successful. Well, with reservations, Emilia Clarke and Marguerite Bennett are on the right track with Mother of Madness, greatly helped by some phenomenal art from Leila Leiz.

The future in which this is set is only twenty years away, yet equality and social progress has stalled, and regressed as far as equality for women is concerned. Leading character Maya Kuyper is a single mother who as a teenager took pills concocted by her now dead father, an experimental chemist. It’s one of several points where Maya’s motivation isn’t clear. Was it an attempt at suicide? The eventual result is an assortment of super powers connected to her emotional state, which she uses but relatively anonymously at the start.

Considerable planning has gone into constructing a believable, if distressing, future, and formidable personalities for the main cast. Additionally, Clarke and Bennett have some issues they want to address, but this is where Maya’s first person narrative isn’t always successful, as it too easily slips into lecturing about objectification, the gender spectrum or men’s poor behaviour. Worse, these lectures can occupy a few pages at a time, and actually acknowledging them as information dumps in-story isn’t charming, it indicates idle writing. It’s not as if the problems women face daily can be distilled into a single convenient package for discussion, but more effort could have been made.

When not preaching to the audience the plot bops along nicely, and with some originality. Maya needs to escalate her superhero activities, but instead of keeping everything secret she trusts her friends, all of whom have skills to make her more effective. At times it seems the behaviour of the villain is too Cruella DeVille, but then the real world throws up a callously self-entitled Michelle Mone every now and then. In this case, though, given the stream of comments about what women are expected to put up with, you may wonder why the big bad is a woman. Not very credibly, it’s because she wants to ensure women are the best they can be. It’s muddled, as are the switches between comedy and human trafficking.

A few pages are more loosely drawn by Leila Del Duca, but otherwise Leiz supplies fulsome detail, creative layouts, people who aren’t objectified and a fine monster near the end. Her contribution is consistently good, and that’s not the case overall. Mother of Madness is well intentioned, energetic and fun in places, but too schizoid to connect as Clarke and Bennett want. And what were they thinking with that cover?