Marvel’s Alan Moore and DC Comics actually beat them to the punch. The celebrated writer’s Top 10 series featured the head of a dead god being used as a location eight years before Star Lord and co. moved into the head of Knowhere.

Coming from the creative team of Alan Moore, Gene Ha and Zander Cannon, Top 10 was one of the launch titles of America’s Best Comics, Wildstorm/DC Comics’ boutique imprint created specifically for Moore. The series concerns the police operating out of a precinct in Neopolis, a city where everyone has superpowers, and therefore citizens must deal with all the complications that brings with it.

Top 10 #10 opens with a homicide at a famous nightclub in Neopolis, the building which just so happens to be the head of some dead god that looks an awful lot like the Celestial Hargen from The Eternals.

Top 10's Club Eternal is Just One of Many Unforgettable Moore Details

Top 10 was highly-acclaimed upon its initial release, with fans and critics alike delighting at the ways Alan Moore played with classic superhero tropes. Moore was inspired by cop shows like Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, wanting to blend the gritty, procedural aesthetic of those shows with superheroes. The visual sight gag of “Club Eternal” is just one of many in-jokes found throughout the twelve-issue run of the original series, which saw many s packed with cameos and Easter Eggs galore of various superhero and science fiction properties.

Even though Alan Moore earlier swore off working for DC Comics, the writer found himself working for the company once again after Image founder Jim Lee sold his Wildstorm imprint to DC

Top 10 was often playful in its blend of superhero and police procedural tropes. One memorable story saw the detectives of Precinct 10 attempt to solve the murder of Baldur at a bar frequented by deities in Neopolis. Struggling to make sense of the nonsensical, the detectives ultimately realize that Baldur’s murder keeps happening over and over again, as the mythology consists of stories that are told again and again for all eternity. Not wanting to file the subsequent eternal paperwork, the detectives ultimately decide to let the murder slide.

Kept a mystery in Marvel Comics for several years, it was eventually revealed that the symbiote god Knull was the entity responsible for beheading the Celestial that would come to be known as Knowhere

Could DC's Celestial Headquarters Helped To Inspire Marvel's Version?

Considering that Top 10 #10 was published eight years before the first appearance of Knowhere in Nova (vol. 4) #8, fans have to wonder if the previous comic was somehow an inspiration on Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning and Wellington Alves when they introduced the future base of the Guardians of the Galaxy following their formation at the end of the Annihilation: Conquest event. Whatever the case, it’s interesting to learn that DC beat Marvel to the chase by using a dead god’s head as a location in Top Ten years before the Guardians of the Galaxy moved into Knowhere’s abandoned noggin.