Don't buy EcchiArt too! The Otaku Box Steals Art from Artists

Just a little disclaimer that this post will contain 18+ content, so if you're not okay with seeing anime tiddies and a bit of hentai I'd stop reading now!

**UPDATE**: The Otaku Box has now blocked caitaron, further showing how scummy they are https://twitter.com/caitaron/status/1284169185908551680

EcchiArt By The Otaku Box

In case you're not as crazy a follower of The Otaku Box as I am, let me fill you in with what's happened in the past few months. Liz has started a new digital subscription service called "EcchiArt", promising lots of ecchi (lewd) artwork among other things. Honestly their marketing has been a mess, they've been promising so much and under-delivering in pretty much every way possible.

But the main thing that caught my eye was how Liz advertised the product as "supporting independent artists". That's very rich coming from a company that has been selling bootleg and unlicensed figures for years at this point, what about the real artists in Japan, Liz?

You can see how the site was advertised for pre-orders in full here, but basically the general gist of it is you pay $15USD a month and get "ecchi" pictures of some cosplayers and some art drawn by some artists of some popular anime characters. Overall the premise doesn't sound that bad, right? Yet Liz and her team still managed to screw things up. You couldn't even get a refund for ages! I wonder how many people just gave up and got charged for another month.

Where Liz Gets Her Artwork

Up until now The Otaku Box has used two main artists for the art on their T-Shirt, wall scrolls, and as inspiration for their figures: caitaron and sevie. The crazy thing is they have been working with caitaron at least since 2017!

At one point Liz did get popular artist sakimichan to do art for a month but I'm guessing she couldn't afford them for longer than that? Sakimichan never replied so who knows if Liz even got permission? Liz at times seems to think that buying something off Gumroad/Patreon means it can be used commercially as much as she wants...

The Allegations

Fast forward to 2020 where caitaron posted these two tweets:

This was quickly followed by sevie posting the following:

You can read the full statement on her Patreon here, but a quick summary is that they used artwork that had been commissioned for The Otaku Box on EcchiArt without their permission, even though there was an agreed upon "2 drawings per month, they can use the drawings for items in the box and I can use the digital version for supporters". When sevie asked about this, they even blocked her emails.This is pretty scummy, and as sevie says themselves, a confusing decision by Liz considering that sevie and caitaron have been providing basically all Otaku Box art for the past 2 years. I'm sure their art is the primary reason a lot of people still choose to stay subscribed to The Otaku Box.

In summary, Liz does not respect her artists, she steals more art than agreed from them, and has treated them shadily with the launch of this new EcchiArt service.

"Crediting" Artists

Let's look at how Liz credits someone for an artwork on EcchiArt:

"By: Sevie" isn't a link to anywhere, which is incredibly lazy, even I take the effort to add a simple link to a Twitter page so that people can actually support the artist. What's the point of touting how much you're supporting your artists, Liz, if you can't even take 5 seconds to link to their Twitter/Patreon/Pixiv? This laziness shows how much Liz really cares about the artists she works with.

I feel especially sorry for whoever "Ink" is:

What am I meant to do with that Liz? Do you know how hard it is to find an artist called "Ink" on Google!? I tried "Ink artist", "Ink anime artist", and "Ink ecchi" all to no avail, if anyone knows who this is please comment below so they can get some recognition. Pretty terrible behaviour from Liz here, clearly to her "Support Independent Artists" means steal from them, mislead them, and do the absolute bare minimum to credit them to the point where people can't even find the rest of their work.

Thanks for reading, as a thanks for getting this far you can see what an EcchiArt subscription might look like here (honestly Liz, maybe Fiverr isn't the best place to be getting web developers from). EcchiArt is yet another dumpster fire of a product by The Otaku Box, they don't deserve a cent of your money.