Was Inception a heist?

I'm in a bad mood today, so be warned. The normal snarkiness and smirkitude presented here has given way to a semi-serious "don't mess with me" tone. That's really not the tone with which to present a story like this, so it's sure going to seem like I'm more invested in this than I really am. First, read this:
Substitute a fancy device that looks like a heroin-dispensing octopus in a briefcase, swap out the "beagles" for Eaves, Ariadne, and Arthur, exchange Donald for Cobb, replace Scrooge with Fischer...you see what we're saying here? Yes, Christopher Nolan stole the general idea for the most original, creative American mainstream film in decades from a Scrooge McDuck comic strip from 2004.

Obviously, this is not true. There's no world in which this was the inspiration for or had anything to do with Inception. It's more of a fascinating example how the same idea can be present in multiple places. For example, my friend and I were once discussing an idea for a comic book that involved some other plane of reality. The easiest way for him to explain his idea to me was that the entire world in question disappeared every time we turned to look at it, that it was constantly "just over your left shoulder." That was the same phrase used to describe "Midnight Nation," a comic about someone who slips through into a world "over your left shoulder." That's weird, right? There's a bunch of those things out there, and I hope that nobody actually tries to link a hand-drawn duck gag about dream invasion (which has had MANY, MANY stories written about it) to something awesome like Inception. I hope they just laugh at it because it's funny.

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