I agree with you: as creators, we need to come together and encourage one another wherever possible!
Personally, I struggle with comparisons too, although I've been a lot better about it in the last year or two. What I have to remember is that my style is different from another artist's, my approach is different, my stories are different; I had a major breakthrough when I realized I wasn't really being honest with myself. I'd look at another artist's work, another comic or what have you, and feel immediately bad about what I was doing.
Then I took a step back and asked myself, "is that really what you want to do?"
It wasn't. It never is. Even if it's something similar, it's not the same. Even if it's along the same lines, I would realize it differently, I would develop it differently.
It's still very hard to look at things sometimes if I like the style or approach, but something important to remember is that every artist has a different style. Like Judy Garland said, be yourself -- you'll only ever be a second-rate someone else. There already is one, after all!
We all have the things we're doing, and they're fantastic. We must hold onto them and keep working to develop our own personal styles. We're so familiar with our own work, our own output, that it often doesn't give us the same feelings or effects that others' work will. That's just natural. But it does give those feelings to others who enjoy our work. We are always going to be our own harshest critics, in large part because we are so intimately familiar with every slightest flaw due to working so long and so intimately with our art.
I'm always better at it when I'm giving someone feedback or critique they've approached me for, but I've finally started to remember it for myself: in art, there really is no "better" or "worse", art is expression and there is no handy scale for absolute figuring of quality. Photorealism for example is not superior, and it isn't a goal for every artist, or even most artists -- which is a huge thing for some people to realize. We must walk away from terms that set certain specific stylistic approaches above others. There is no better or worse, as I said; there is only "different".
We can always develop, and we will be developing the whole time we are creating art. A good artist, I think, continually develops and tries to become the best possible at any given time. It's perpetual learning. But as artists, and as audiences that appreciate creative work, I feel we must reach the point of understanding that every artist and every style is -- and should be -- essentially different. We must appreciate our abilities and skill that we have worked so hard to cultivate.
