>>7649690
Copying and tracing are also skills in and of themselves. Lining your own sketches is a form of tracing. Doing animation work and keeping things consistent requires tracing to a large degree, and being able to stay on-model is absolutely required if not doing a solo job.

Much of the animosity towards copying from retards is reserved for single pieces because they mistakenly think art is just some expression of a god-given talent where you are just some sort of special person with a physical equivalent of psychic powers. This means they view copying the IDEA as some form of stolen valor ("this is not from your spiritual muse, you fraud!" type of shit). People who don't know how the fuck creativity works are the most often to do this, as well as - if an artist themselves - the most likely to fall into impostor syndrome and depressive mood swings over it.

And yet, the reason the same sorts of people will respond like in that picture >>7649474
is because they take the whole comic, in aggregate, to be the creative work, even if the components are copied.

It's monumentally retarded because it's rooted in a false understanding of reality. Artists who cling to this end up never advancing very far, but artists who ditch it early rapidly get pretty damn good conceptually even when their technical skills are still really /beg/. It's one of the most limiting factors on your own ability and it's entirely in your control to remove.

>>7600243
Counterpoint:
I used to consider it not-art and now I do.

It just required more learning and dealing with correcting the fundamental contradictions and errors in my worldview/assumptions about reality.