Comic book fans are everywhere, and it seems A Song of Ice and Fire (the book Game of Thrones is based on) author George R. R. Martin is no exception.
In an interview with Fast Company, Martin opened up about how it feels every time he kills another Game of Thrones character. This practice, he revealed, dates all the way back to when he was 12 years old and reading Avengers comics.
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For Game of Thrones fans, characters of all different moral grounds being killed isn't a new concept and neither is seeing characters who flip-flop between good and bad. According to Martin, these tropes have been favorites of his ever since he read an Avengers story about Wonder Man.
"Wonder Man was a guy who joins the Avengers a new superhero who appears and he joins the Avengers but he’s really a supervillain who’s been created to join them pretending to be a hero, join them on false premises and then destroy them when their guard is down from within but when it gets to the moment that he’s supposed to destroy them he has a crisis of conscience and he can’t destroy them," he explained. "So he sacrificed his own life and dies instead. I love this comic, it was terrific."
The comic in question is 1964's Avengers #9, by Stan Lee, Don Heck, Dick Ayres, Stan Goldberg and Art Simek, which is also the first appearance of Simon Williams/Wonder Man. The character would later be revived and become a longstanding member of the Avengers, developing ties with several big-name Marvel heroes.
"I've looked back on this and I've been doing it my entire career --even before I had a career," Martin also stated. "When I was a 12-year-old and a 13-year old I was writing for comic book fanzines. I remember one of the first things I wrote, a little amateur story about a superhero I called the White Raider and it was published in a comic fanzine when I was in seventh grade. And the White Raider dies in his first adventure."
Airing Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO, Game of Thrones stars Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Jaime Lannister, Lena Headey as Cersei Lannister, Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen, Sophie Turner as Sansa Stark, Maisie Williams as Arya Stark and Kit Harington as Jon Snow.
(via Laughing Squid)