Recently TV Squad visited the set of “Heroes” and talked to Masi “Hiro” Oka.  He was asked about the comics inspiration for last night’s episode, but first:

Have you had a chance to read any comics yourself lately?

Masi: Recently, not as much. I mean, I was going to say that I don’t read too many American comics. I read a lot of the Japanese manga. I still read that.

What are you into right now?

Masi: Right now I love ‘One Piece’. ‘The Police Station’. There is all this great stuff in there. My favorite author is Naoki Urasawa. He wrote ‘Monster’, ’20th Century Boys’ and now he’s writing a thing called ‘Pluto’, which is an homage to the old manga…I don’t know what you guys call it … ‘Astro Boy’! So he’s doing that and there’s this whole utopian society based on a different perspective of things, which is very cool.

SPOILERS for “Five Years Gone”/”String Theory” behind the jump.

Last week the question was whether Linderman’s plot owed too much to Ozymandias’.  This week features a dire possible future, with a Hero-hating politician, governmental goon squads rounding up supers, and a climactic assault on the Department of Homeland Security — in other words, everything but Sentinels.  Seems more cut-and-dried this time:

Are you familiar at all with the “Days of Future Past” X-Men storyline that Episode 20 is based on?

Masi: Yeah, I am. What was it, Uncanny X-Men #143 or #146? We actually got it wrong in the pilot. We said in the pilot that it was #143 and that Kitty Pryde goes back in time, but it was actually #144 or #145 or something.[*] We never got a chance to fix that. But I know Jesse and Aron (Jesse Alexander and Aron Coleite, the writers for this episode; Jesse also serves as co-executive producer) those guys, that was the model for it. Originally though, Episode 20 [last night's episode] was supposed to come up much earlier. They were talking about doing that in Episode 9 or 10 and the network was like “Oooooh!” They saved it and now it’s become a very cool plot. 20 is f_cking awesome, by the way, I have to say.

No arguments here.  More at the link, including minor spoilers for next week’s episode.

[* Actually, it was Uncanny #s 141-42, as our own JK Parkin noted:

"Days of Future Past was Uncanny 141 and 142.  Let me fly my geek flag:

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