I posted the following at the Six Shooter Comix Forums page. They're the awsome guys that bring us Free Comix every month.

All the good stories have already been written.

Is that statement true? How original can something be these days? When you get an idea for a story that sounds great, do you look around to see if there's already something similar or do you just go ahead and write it?

For example a friend and I were brainstorming on characters. We both know a girl named Raven who we decided to base a character on. We read up on Ravens, mainly the Native American mythology. Raven is considered a trickster, shape shifter, greedy, etc. We then did a write up of this character. A few days later I’m reading the new Mystique book and realize her name is Raven and she's a changeling. We in no way copied her character but still came out with a very similar character (except for the blue skin).

Example #2
We're sitting around again, brainstorming. (More writing and less talking would probably be better) He starts setting up a scene for me "This person does this, then that happens, and she kills so and so blah blah blah" "Didn't we watch a show last week where that happened?" "What? Huh yea I think we did" "Fuck" "It was cool though" "Yea". Unknowingly he had fused 3 different shows into one scene.

Are there any stories left to write?

Freon