Maybe I'm not an old-timer enough, because I don't recall the good old days. The way I recall it, high-quality guro art has always been scarce and timeless images would appear very infrequently. Over the past five years or so, it felt like guro experienced a brief resurgence, but now it's starting to feel like it's fading. That's not extinction, that's just things going back to normal, as I see it.

I still love this pic. I sometimes credit it as the pic that really, truly, sparked my interest in guro and near-guro. But how old is it? 25, 30 years old, maybe? I lost my personal treasure trove 15 years ago to a RAID array failure and never bothered to make a new one, and yet I can't think of a single image from it that I haven't seen resurface again since then. There's just never been enough output to put the past in the past.

Guro is a niche genre. We aren't always going to have talented artists prolifically outputting high quality work. When someone is around and interested, we get good work. I remember a few times when it felt like a queue of good artists was lining up for their turn, but those periods are rare and brief.