/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

>>3867930
I just really hate how everything in the west has to be fanart. Even new things that aren't fanart are clearly stemming off something that is already popular in that moment or riding some sort of wave. Every single youtube channel, artist on twitter, everything I follow has carved a niche that is based off some sort existing fandom.
I'm sure that if you have an interesting original thing going on in Japan you get noticed. Maybe just a little but you get noticed. In the west? No fucking chance. A thing like OPM would never have happened in the west.

Isn't it really weird how there's so few people selling instructional material in Japan while the west is absolutely chock full even if the west produces 1/1000th of the material? If there were a lot of art gurus in Japan, some of them would have surely been translated, right? Even if it's "how to draw manga shit", something would have come up. They make a trillion manga every year, you would assume there's a shitton of manga gurus, right? Instead there's nothing or very little of it.
In the West half the successful artists are art gurus, the teach how to draw and this and that. For what? Where is the material produced by all these artists we're training? Even more ironic, many of these art gurus also sell their works / comics and that shit goes nowhere. There are so many artists I've seen that do commissions or teach and are very successful, then I discover their personal project and it's DEAD, shit like 9 patrons total.
Why the fuck does the west learn so much when there's absolutely nothing to produce? So many mangaka in Japan have OK art that would get shunned here on /ic/, but they work because there's a market of some sort and people maybe like the style. The more I look at the west the more I see utter desperation to find a market that doesn't exist.

Something was happening, for good or for worse, in the early 2000s when the internet was fresh but then it just fizzled out.