story keys and thoughts on inspiration

So here's some story keys from a project I've been working on for way too long.
By working I mean, being unsatisfied with my skills and avoiding showing anything from it, feeling I'm not able to create something that represents what I want to achieve properly. Guess what.
That is really dumb. I'm amazed how dumb I am sometimes.

Anyhow, I did some sketches of this back in school a couple of years ago, and it seems one of my former classmates and a very good friend of mine unconsciously got quite inspired by a particular design concept, and used it recently in his teams most excellent steampunk contest entry.
I guess it was a good thing, because it really shook me up, and now I feel I pretty much have to show this, just to make sure that if I one day should manage to get the project going and look the way I want, I'm not going to look like a ripoff of something I originally came up with.
Such tricky stuff..

I think our approach, context, compositions and emotions are quite different, and theres probably room enough in the world for more than one Dali-legged-boat walking between islands in a sea of fog.
Mine is a organic creature-vehicle capable of travelling between the astral planes in the story I'm working on.
If you want to see the original drawing for this, and check out my old workspace at school, you can try and take a look here.

This sequence shows the main protagonist being picked up by Charon at the bank of the river Styx and taken to the underworld.
I came up with this sweet thing about a hooded dude picking up dead people by a river for coins, and ferry them to the land of the dead(c)
pretty cool eh? Oops..
ehm... bear in mind this is a very small part of a larger complex story, but the design and idea of the underworld and how to get there, is something I would like to be able to say 'I came up with this'.

So all I want do really, is to get these out there, and continue to work with the story and design, as a lot of it is still very loose.
Also I would appreciate thoughts and feedback on these.

I don't care where people get their ideas, as long as they make something awesome and give credit, where credits due.
I was lucky that Andreas is an awesome guy, and he agreed to give a thanks in the credits.
Thanks a lot man! I hope you dudes win!

Ok, bit of rambling there, just had to get of my mind.
Thanks for reading if you did.
Take care.