How Stan Lee inspired George R.R. Martin to become a cold-blooded character killer

Everyone has childhood heroes they look up to and aspire to be like. Comic book legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were heroes to George R. R. Martin, the creator of Game of Thrones. Martin frequently and publicly acknowledges that he has been a Marvel geek since the debut of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man. And they might’ve actually inspired his way of writing in A Song of Ice and Fire novels.

Why George R.R. Martin moved on from DC to Marvel

DC had a pretty good hold on the comic book industry back when Martin was young, and that’s where he began his comic journey. In an interview with The Independent, he explained why he moved on to Marvel:

“The stories never went anywhere. Superman would be there, and his girlfriend Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen his best friend, Perry White the editor of the Daily Planet, and something would happen. At the end of the story, everything would be exactly the way it was at the beginning of the story, for issue after issue, year after year.”

Stan Lee inspired the various twists of Westeros

Martin gushed about Lee’s influence on his work, “Stan Lee’s writing was so much better than what you’d been getting. Things happened. Spider-Man was progressing. It was so refreshing.”

“That’s all Stan Lee, and you can see it all over my work! Unexpectedly killing characters, characters who are not what they seem, characters who are partly good and partly bad. Grey characters. You don’t know which way they’re going to jump when the moment of crisis comes. Stan Lee’s fingerprints are all over that.”

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