old wine in new bottles

What happens after Tolkien?

My big idea lately has been the modern state of the sf/fantasy genre as fundamentally regressive: a hole to hide in, not an escape hatch. We're still talking about Lord of the Rings a hundred years later, still mining it for ideas; any comic book character that wants to keep their own book solvent had better be at least sixty years old, and even Deadpool, the exception that proves the rule, just past his twentieth anniversary.

The problem with even having this thought is that it immediately engenders a cynical reaction: of course you want something new to show up, you are new, this is a cry for attention, blah blah blabbity boo. Always makes me think of a guy I knew who was clearly using a similar argument as viral marketing, and as far as I'm concerned, one of the fastest ways to torpedo your own argument is to make it obvious that you're using it to sell something.

That's fantasy, though: stuck in Tolkien for over a century. There have been people worth talking about; Martin, Jordan, arguably Eddings, certainly Bradley and LeGuin, but Tolkien's the boomerang influence. It keeps coming back to him, if only through his bastard son Dungeons & Dragons.

So here's the question, inspired a bit by Warren Ellis's comics work in the Apparat Singles Group: what comes next after Tolkien? Do you just mine a different mythology, the way he was self-consciously rewriting English folklore, or do you go off somewhere else? And if you do, who notices?