Tonks_kittygoth, I believe the comic and film were mentioned somewhere on this thread...Did anyone throw in History of Violence yet?
Especially since the Rocketeer film is based upon the Dave Stevens comic series, which was itself a huge tribute/homage to earlier pop culture...Rocketter would go for the influence thing.
I'm kind of surprised no one mentioned MirrorMask, the Dave McKean/Neil Gaiman film collaboration... especially given the creators' famous comic book work. Not one of my favorite films, but not as bad as some critics seemed to think.
McKean worked with Gaiman on Violent Cases, Black Orchid, the wonderful Signal to Noise, and a few other comics/graphic novels, and he did the covers for Gaiman's Sandman series. McKean also illustrated Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum graphic novel. I thought at the time and still believe that Arkham is one of the coolest Batman books ever, with the "I look at the doll house, and the doll house looks at me" and "How's the Boy Wonder? Has he started shaving yet?" scenes being personal favorites. And all the Golden Bough and Jungian and Freudian stuff... And McKean wrote and illustrated Cages, one of the most underappreciated English-language comics of recent years. (The comic ran in the early Nineties, and it was collected in a really nice edition in 2002.) Cages has a really odd Kafka, Borges, and Calvino vibe to it... The conversation between the cat and God (or an aspect of God, or one of the character's idea of God) is great. ("So... what are you saying, that creation is just a sort of repeating pattern?" "I think so. Like a spiral. It repeats but also comments on itself. See?" "No, not really... So this is it, is it? Your job? Reminding her about her chocolate cake, or her unhappy childhood, or... that sort of stuff. Don't you feel a bit... I don't know, emasculated?") And the stuff with the writer... "Fear of freedom, Leo. Everybody's a bird, locked up in a pretty cage. Sometimes you fly to a slightly bigger one, but you never quite have the courage to abandon captivity completely..." <shudders>