Is GM's Coyote Gospel AM's Pog Redone?

I read Grant Morrison's "The Coyote Gospel" in _Animal Man_ and was admittedly damn impressed. I agreed with a letter written in the letters column that someone should put up for an Eagle (the many years ago of the actually time period in which it was written, of course).

But then I had to admit that Morrison has a penchant for doing something that Warren Ellis does, though in a different direction. Ellis takes a work and muses over it and interprets it in the most nihilistic and vile sense possible. He's done this once with Miyazaki's _Castle in the Sky_, but I can't recall the comic title at the moment. I'm not a fan of Ellis, and the post in which I wrote about this many, many years ago is lost somewhere on John Reppion's and Leah Moore's site.

With "Coyote Gospel," Morrison took Moore's idea behind "Pog" and used a different comic character. Yet I have to say that "CG" is still valid, but is it derivative? Does it make a difference? Aren't there a limited set of ideas out there, and can we rightly say that Moore is the first to do the kind of tribute that he did with "Pog"? I think the grand mastery of "Pog" makes me want to hold others up to the same standard, and Morrison approaches it.

I'm just wondering: Could Morrison have created such a story without using Moore's as an impetus?