Let’s call it a mixed week for James Cameron.

True, Avatar swept up nine Academy Award nominations including Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Directing, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Picture, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Visual Effects.

But it was also ousted from the top spot at the box office over the weekend by Nicholas Sparks’ Dear John, a schmaltzy, uninspired excuse of a rom-com starring Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried. (Who? Exactly.)

Most critics attribute this surprise takeover to Tatum’s chiseled abs. (Queue quiet snickering, finger pointing, etc.)

No, but seriously, back to the Oscar nominations thing. Along with the Academy’s totally hue-ist snubbing of so many blue-tinted virtuoso performances, there was one category that seemed conspicuously absent from the above list: Best Adapted Screenplay.

Now obviously I’m not the only one who noticed some major similarities between Avatar’s clichéd, paper-thin plot and a handful of other films/stories including (but not limited to) Fern Gully, Pocahontas, Halo, and of course Costner’s 1990 tatonka-and-loin-cloth epic, Dances With Wolves.

But now Ecorazzi is reporting:

[T]he entertainment website Heavy.com is making a case for the uncanny resemblances between James Cameron’s Avatar and a comic book series titled Firekind.

Firekind ran weekly in 2000 AD, a British science fiction comic anthology best known for its Judge Dredd stories. Created by John Smith and Paul Marshall, the comic series features a human botanist named Hendrick Larsen who travels to Gennyo-Leil, a jungle alien world with a toxic atmosphere, large dragons, blue-skinned natives, and floating rocks.

Heavy charted a table of comparison and described the plot similarities noting that, “If you were to sell Firekind or any kind of fire today, you’d be told it was a rip-off of Avatar – even though it predates the earliest 1994 ‘scriptments’ of Avatar by a year.”

Hmmmm. Fascinating.

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