Anything that has proven to be successful for me, and broken through to the wider audience, has been a collection of part exploitation film, part comic book, and part animation (in the dynamic sense of how animation grabs you.) Even if it was a grounded environmental documentary series, I have followed the first commandment: Thou shalt never bore your audience.
I've worked to put each narrative together in order to create a piece of media which has (most of the time) either broken through, or -- in a few select scenarios -- CHANGED the pop culture landscape. No one thought to make The Breakfast Club a horror movie before Bad Kids Go to Hell.
I had a LOT of copy cats.