

But the fact that he was introduced and joined the AvengersĪnd died all in that one issue had a great impact on me when I was a HeĬame back a year or two later and had a long run for many, manyĭecades. Of course, being comic books, Wonder Man didn’t stay dead for long. To tragic, doomed characters ever since I was a high-school kid. I liked theĬharacter-it was a tragic, doomed character. Me vividly! Wonder Man dies in that story. And you know why? Now it’s coming back to In his first published letter to Lee and Kirby-which you can watch him read out loud on the History Channel-fifteen-year-old Martin sounds like one of his own starstruck fans as he gushes wildly about Fantastic Four #17 (1963): “It was absolutely stupendous, the ultimate, utmost.” In the face of this praise, Lee and Kirby replied, “We might as well quit while we’re ahead.” They started the whole thing but he re-started it and made it so much better.” “Stan Lee was probably the most important in the history of comic books at least since Siegel and Shuster who created Superman. “I’m still digesting it,” Martin says of Lee’s death. That includes Martin, who absorbed the lessons of Lee’s heroes and anti-heroes as a boy and filtered them through the lens of Tolkien in his decade-defining blockbuster saga Game of Thrones. The men and women who grew up on a steady diet of Lee’s comic universe at Marvel are now the ones dictating the stories we see in theaters and at home. Though he got his start in comic books, it’s impossible to consider Lee’s lasting legacy without acknowledging that the world he created has likely been the biggest factor in shaping Hollywood over the past decade. Speaking with Vanity Fair from his home in Santa Fe Monday afternoon, Martin reflected on how Lee forever changed the way we tell stories. In fact, Martin’s first published works were letters he wrote to Lee and artist Jack Kirby as a young comic-book fan growing up in New Jersey.

But if you pull the camera back beyond Martin’s most famous and fantastical world of Westeros to his larger body of work, which includes the upcoming Syfy adaptation of his novella Nightflyers, a more coherent pattern of Lee-esque storytelling emerges. Tolkien and Martin’s mentor and sci-fi legend Roger Zelazny are his most oft-cited influences.

Martin and the late comic-book creator Stan Lee might not be immediately apparent. The connection between A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R.
