The creator is lazy but inventive, IMO. I wonder if it's not the whole manga industry Shou is a little angry at. I also doubt he did the shameful mangas out of a devotion to the genre, it was almost certainly guaranteed income. My reaction was: the hentai manga were really bad and should be held against him, it makes you question where his head's really at. Tracing an ad and then altering it substantially? you've gotta be kidding me. that's intellectual property inhibiting creativity, if anything. I was on his side 100% and still am.
As an artist, I think I understand where his plagiarism problem comes from. See, where I studied art, we didn't have required courses on copyright law. I had to learn how to identify plagiarism by studying research writing, and I can tell you that plagiarism, technically, is any time that an original work is referenced without attributing proper credit. This definition applies to any medium, so whether you're writing and you use a quote, data or inference from some published material, or you're an artist and you borrow a pose, composition or any element from a piece of commercial work, if you don't credit the original, then it's plagiarism.
As a student, we all did this. We all reproduced, altered and repurposed published work by established artists. That's not a problem for student and non-commercial work, and it's also not a problem if you have permission from the copyright holders. But it can become a crutch. At some point, you need to be taught about ethics and artistic integrity--because you're not born with that knowledge--but clearly not everyone is.
What I find amazing is the difference in attitudes regarding plagiarism between the Japanese comic industry, which fired Shou for plagiarizing art and cancelled his series, and the American comic industry, which has let plagiarists like Greg Land get away with it for years.
