George R.R. Martin Had a Dark Vision for the Comic That Inspired Superman 2

This post contains spoilers for the finale of Peacemaker season 2.

In the last moments of the Peacemaker season 2 finale, James Gunn reveals the future of the DCU. ARGUS head Rick Flag Sr. has enacted a plan to get all metahumans off of Earth, sending them to an extra-dimensional planet called Salvation. ARGUS’s kidnapping of metahumans, and the consequences of Flag’s decision to work with Lex Luthor, will be the focus of the Superman sequel, Man of Tomorrow. We also know that the Salvation concept comes from Salvation Run, a 2007 miniseries by Bill Willingham, Lilah Sturges, and Sean Chen.

However, many still don’t know that Salvation Run was originally an idea by Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, nor do many know what Martin had intended to do with the series. Well, now we do. And by “now,” I mean, “Back in 2007, when Martin talked about it on his website.”

Around the time that Salvation Run #1 hit comic book shelves, Martin made a post on his blog Not a Blog that outlined his plan for the comic. And, to the surprise of no one, it really sounded like a George R.R. Martin project.

According to Martin, he and collaborator John Jos pitched to DC editor Andy Helfer, the man also responsible for the influential Justice League International, a 10-issue series called Exiles in Paradise. “The idea that John and I pitched him, way back then, can be summed up in one word: Australia,” recalled Martin. “What if the world finally got sick of all these super-villains and decided to get rid of them once and for all by transporting them to a distant planet, with no way home?”

The answer Martin and Jos came up with sounds familiar to anyone who has visited Westeros. “We wanted to tell a story that would span decades. Characters would die, would change, would marry, would have children,” Martin continued. “Wars would be fought, but eventually, from the chaos and brutality of the early days, a society would be born. Some of the villains would find only death on the new world, but for others it would be a second chance, and they would find redemption. The whole tale, once told, would span decades. None of the villains would ever return to Earth.”

How could Martin and Jos get away with such wholesale destruction? By making Exiles in Paradise an Elseworlds series, a story set in an alternative reality outside of main continuity. Yet, even with that caveat, DC got cold feet.

Martin explained, “As we plotted out the second issue, it became clear that the story John and I wanted to tell was a good deal darker and grittier than what Andy Helfer was comfortable with. A dozen villains died in issue one alone, some of them “name” villains, and that was just to start. There was murder, there was sex, there were even porta-potties (which became a big issue, somehow),” he said, describing a project that sounds like most of Martin’s work.

Eventually, all parties amicably decided to put Exiles in Paradise on the backburner. That is, until the mid-2000s, when DC’s then editor-in-chief Dan Didio decided to revive it, this time as a story in mainline continuity. That prospect excited Martin, who admitted that he found Elsewords, What If…, and other “imaginary stories” (as they were called in the early Silver Age) “vaguely unsatisfying, somehow,” because when “a story begins with a disclaimed that says no, this didn’t really happen, the stakes are lowered from page one.”

Yet, once again, the ideas of Martin and Jos were too bold for DiDio, and so the duo handed the project off to Willingham (whom Martin called “a first rate writer), and the series we know today was created.

For the longest time, no one gave Martin and Jos’s original pitch much thought. Obviously, there was no way that DC would put characters related to Batman and Superman, even villains, in a story with so much sex and violence. But today, DC Studios is co-chaired by James Gunn, whose first DC movie featured lots of supervillains getting shot in the head. Peacemaker season 2, the bridge between Superman and Man of Tomorrow, has a full-on orgy in episode one.

Clearly, it’s a new day in the DC Universe. Gunn has been clear that he’s just borrowing the concept of Salvation Run and not specific plot points. But will he revisit some of the original pitch that scared off DC Comics all those years ago? Because this story is not written by Martin, we’ll find out when Man of Tomorrow hits theaters in 2027.