[discostu]

Of course if you do some not so easy digging into that era you'll find Shakespeare did a lot of ripping off too. A lot of his stuff comes from Greek tragedy, most of the rest comes from Italian contemporaries who didn't have the renown he did.

Good plots though always translate regardless of genre.

[Question_Assumptions]

The problem isn't that modern comic/SF/fantasy authors rip off their ideas. The problem is that they are fans. Imagine Shakespeare as a fanboy of Italian plays, for example, and what his work might have looked like.

[Question_Assumptions]

Whoops. Crossed replies. (One of the reasons that I wish Free Republic was "threaded".)

Yes, Shakespeare stole but he improved and made things his own. To combine this with my earlier thought, modern comic writers could learn a thing or two from Shakespeare. It actually isn't fair to single out any particular element of Shakespeare for praise. Once could read and enjoy him for the poetry/language, for the characters, or for the plot. One of the more interesting proposals for a national education standard I've heard (in National Review, I think) was to require every high school student to pick a Shakespeare play and write a paper about it as a requirement for graduation. It would help create a common culture such that people could talk about which play they picked in social situations.