Given the fact that Game of Thrones and comic book movies are the feet of the geek colossus that now bestrides mainstream popular culture, combining author George RR Martin with a new TV series about superheroes seems like a licence to print money.

Though it sounds like the “add X to Y” brainwave of a TV execs meeting, the forthcoming Wild Cards series has in fact been three decades in the making.

Martin announced on his blog at the weekend that Universal Cable Productions has acquired the rights to the Wild Cards series of books, which he describes as “a universe, as large and diverse and exciting as the comic book universes of Marvel and DC (though somewhat grittier, and considerably more realistic and more consistent), with an enormous cast of characters”.

The Wild Cards series debuted in 1986 – 10 years before the Game of Thrones novel kicked off Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series – and came at a time when superheroes didn’t have the widespread cultural cachet they do now. It was, however, a time of great change in comics, with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns heralding a darker and grimmer chapter for masked vigilantes.

Wild Cards both fed into this and veered away from it, joyfully mining the tropes of classic comic books and pulp fiction but attempting to inject them with a dose of logic and realism. But aside from the subject matter, the Wild Cards series was also innovative in its construction. Martin and his co-editor Melinda Snodgrass used a variety of big-name science fiction and fantasy authors to compile a shared universe that wasn’t quite a short story anthology and not quite a collaborative piece but something in between – what they called a “mosaic novel”, with different stories featuring different characters written by different writers, but interlocking into a wider narrative.

The high concept of the Wild Cards series was that at the height of the second world war an alien virus was unleashed on the world – initially over New York – which changed the course of history. Ninety percent of those exposed to the virus died instantly, but of those 10 in 100 who survived, nine were horribly disfigured – they drew the “joker”, in the parlance of the series – while just 1% were dealt an “ace” and gifted with comic-book-style superpowers.

From this divergent point in the alternate history, Martin, Snodgrass and their legion of writers, including Pat Cadigan, Cherie Priest, X-Men comic writer Chris Claremont and the late Roger Zelazny, crafted a cohesive world that has the magic of the comic books it echoes but none of the continuity issues gathered over several decades.

As Martin points out, the Wild Cards universe is at least as populous as Westeros, giving the producers of the forthcoming TV adaptation a huge tapestry of stories to go at. The first volume in 1986 introduced Doctor Tachyon, a benign and extravagantly attired member of the alien race that unleashed the virus in 1941; the Great and Powerful Turtle, who used his telekinetic abilities to encase himself in a flying shell; Cap’n Trips, who employed hallucinogenics to turn on to his super abilities; and Jetboy, a pulp-ish fighter ace who tried to save the world from the virus released over Manhattan.

Alongside these Aces are the grotesque and deformed Jokers, forced into ghettos, subjected to bigotry and hatred and even becoming the subject of 1960s civil rights fights in the alternate reality of the Wild Cards timeline.

As well as the books, Wild Cards has been adapted into comics (of course) and role-playing games – indeed, the whole concept grew out of superhero RPG sessions played by Martin and Snodgrass – but will it work as a TV series?

It seems difficult to see how it will fail. With Martin’s name attached to it, it’s certainly going to attract curious Game of Thrones fans, even if they have no familiarity with the source material. And despite some lukewarm reviews for the latest comic book movies, especially DC’s Batman v Superman and its newest release, Suicide Squad, the public’s appetite for celluloid superheroes seems to continue unabated.

Wild Cards also has the benefit of a fanbase that’s been growing for 30 years – there are now 22 books – and a concerted effort from the outset to keep tight control over continuity, meaning the TV producers won’t have to wade through decades of comics history to work out how to fit the disparate elements all together.

Add to all that, Wild Cards is actually great. There have been many attempts over the past few years to answer the question: “What if superheroes existed in the real world?” But this series gives it a better shot than pretty much anything else. Wild Cards seems such an obvious choice for TV adaptation that the only real surprise in George RR Martin’s announcement is why it’s taken so long.