George R.R. Martin remembers Stan Lee

Yesterday, the entertainment industry lost a creative icon: comic book legend Stan Lee, who died at the age of 95. Lee was solely or jointly responsible for creating everyone from Spider-Man to Thor to Iron Man to Captain America to the X-Men and beyond. With that kind of resume, he’s inspired a few creatives of his own, including A Song of Ice and Fire creator George R.R. Martin, who talked about Lee to a few outlets, including USA Today:

"(It’s) devastating. I met Stan a number of times. I can’t say I really knew him. But of course, he had a huge influence on my work. I was a Marvel kid. I grew up reading Spider-Man and the Avengers and Fantastic Four…He was a great writer and modern comic books, the Marvel Universe, is really his legacy."

Lee also printed Martin’s first published work, kind of. “First stuff I ever published was a letter in a letter column in ‘Fantastic Four No. 20,'” Martin remembered. Read it below:

“Stan Lee was probably the most important in the history of comic books at least since [Jerome] Siegel and [Joe] Shuster who created Superman,” he told Vanity Fair’s Joanna Robinson. “They started the whole thing but he re-started it and made it so much better.”

Lee’s storytelling affected Martin in some very direct ways. For example, the issue that inspired Martin to write his fan letter introduced a character named Wonder Man, who died in that very issue. Martin talked about why this resonated with him while talking to John Hodgman on The Sound of Young America back in 2011:

"I liked Wonder Man. And you know why? [Laughs] Now it’s coming back to me vividly! Wonder Man dies in that story. He’s a brand new character, he’s introduced, and he dies. It was very heart-wrenching. I liked the character—it was a tragic, doomed character. I guess I’ve responded to tragic, doomed characters ever since I was a high-school kid.Of course, being comic books, Wonder Man didn’t stay dead for long. He came back a year or two later and had a long run for many, many decades. But the fact that he was introduced and joined the Avengers and died all in that one issue had a great impact on me when I was a high-school kid."

That’s ringing a bell for us. Who does that sound like?

Robinson draws lots of fascinating parallels between Lee’s work and Martin’s. Lee was long drawn to society’s outcasts, with the X-Men, mutants feared and hated by the general population, being the most obvious example. Likewise, Martin’s story highlights the “cripples, bastards, and broken things” of Westeros, such as Bran Stark, Jon Snow and Tyrion Lannister. And here’s an excerpt from Den of Geek editor John Saavedra’s analysis of Martin’s work:

"Don’t forget the Night’s Watch, which might be the most powerful example of family in the entire series: lost, cowardly, bad, and honorable men from all over the land, coming together to protect the world from a common threat. If that doesn’t scream Avengers to you, then I don’t know what."

Stan Lee gave a lot to Martin, and to us. Excelsior, Mr. Lee. Thanks for making many of our childhoods come alive.

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