Why George R.R. Martin Picks Marvel Over DC — One Word
Before Westeros, there were capes. At San Diego Comic-Con 2014, George R.R. Martin traced his lifelong Marvel obsession—from morally gray antiheroes to a formative first encounter with the Fantastic Four—back to his comic-crammed teenage years.
George R.R. Martin has never been coy about his comic book loyalties. He grew up a Marvel kid, he still talks like a Marvel kid, and honestly, it explains a lot about why his own stories go the way they do.
The first hit: a monster on a candy-store spinner rack
Back at the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con, Martin told a quick origin story: as a teenager he stumbled on The Fantastic Four at the Kelly Parkway Candy Store, grabbed it because the monster on the cover looked cool, and got blindsided by what was inside. Early FF issues felt like a revelation to him because the characters actually argued, doubted themselves, and got messy. He points to the stuff Stan Lee and Jack Kirby baked in right away: the human heart in conflict (The Thing hating himself) and the sexual tension of the Sue/Reed/Namor triangle. He loved that you couldn’t predict what Stan was going to pull next, and he flat-out says Marvel’s cast had a depth he didn’t see in the DC books he’d grown up with.
Why he needles DC: it was too safe
Martin’s readers know he thrives on surprise. He’s said as much, and he likes it when the ground moves under you. At the Chicago Humanities Film Festival in 2019, he explained why he leans Spider-Man over Superman: Marvel had the guts to kill Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker’s great love, and let the shock ripple through the story. In his view, DC never did anything remotely that risky with Lois Lane. His bottom line there was simple: in Marvel, no one felt safe and anything could actually happen; in DC, nothing really changed.
Stan Lee shaped the way Martin writes
This isn’t just fandom talk. Martin credits Stan Lee directly for the way he builds characters and twists the knife in his own fiction. If you’ve ever wondered where the moral murk and the sudden, brutal turns in A Song of Ice and Fire came from, he’s happy to point you right at Marvel’s DNA.
'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.'
Case in point: the series is infamous (and bestselling) for exactly that kind of whiplash. It kicked off on August 1, 1996, it’s still ongoing, and it’s published by Bantam Books and Voyager Books. And yeah, the receipts are brutal.
- The Red Wedding and its fallout
- The Purple Wedding that follows a very different playbook
- Ned Stark losing his head when most stories would have swerved
- Jon Snow taking knives from his own brothers
The throughline is obvious: Martin loves characters who live in the grey, and stories that aren’t afraid to make a hard, shocking choice. That’s straight out of the Marvel playbook he grew up on. If you ever blamed Game of Thrones for wrecking your Sunday nights, you can partly blame the kid who picked a comic for the monster on the cover and found something much messier inside.