Well, after 600+ of them, I'd start to get a little lazy, too! ^^;; I'm glad it's here instead of on other portions of the site, though. It's not uncommon for an artist to copy/paste to save time. They do it quite often, but it's usually not too noticeable.
I have several webcomic artist friends, and I'm a bit of an artist myself. The effort involved can be enormous. First of all, the artist has to do a pencil sketch. (Suppose this sketch took 30 minutes to block out and finish.) Then, if they're lucky, they can scan in the pencil art and use a nice digital tablet to ink the lineart (less than an hour). If they're not lucky, they have to ink the drawing by hand, then scan it in. (For this, figure an hour or so depending on whether or not they flub and start over, etc.) Then the artist has to clean up the drawing. (Smooth out lines, erase flubs, etc. Then comes the digital coloring. If they have a tablet, it's usually easier and faster.
A drawing like that, from scratch, might take someone 2.5-3 hours, depending on the hardware available and their experience level. Because there's so much to get done on the site, I can understand a little copy-pasting to save time. I'm also willing to bet that they have digital tablets (*drool*) to cut down on production time.
That said, they ARE seeming a little lazy with new ideas. The image looks like the old one. The idea is essentially the same, and even the composition. THAT'S what seems lazy to me. I don't mind if artists copy-paste, as long as they're doing new things with it.
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