Hiya, folks.  :)

A few days ago, I saw an incidental comment in a 
message on this forum that got me to thinking.  
The poster in question seemed to consider 
seperating a douga and cel to be a mortal sin, and 
the casual tone of the comment implied that this 
was likely a widely held belief.

Which left me, I must say, puzzling... "why?"

Let's take an example.  In my own binders, I have 
a gorgeous Slayers cel of Hellmaster getting his 
arse handed to him by the Lord of Nightmares.  I 
choose this as an example only because I can 
safely say that the only thing that would EVER pry 
this cel from my possession is radical brain 
surgery.  So here I have this lovely cel, and 
behind it is a matching unstuck sketch.

How do I know there's an unstuck sketch?  Only 
because I had to carefully unstick it when the cel 
arrived, since I don't particularly like having 
anything clinging to the back of my pretty cels.  
Aside from that, I haven't looked at the sketch, I 
haven't thought about the sketch, and I certainly 
don't plan to display the sketch.  So there it 
sits behind the cel, probably never to see the 
light of day again.

Now, during the time that this cel has been in my 
gallery, I have received several offers on it, all 
of which have been politely declined.  This tends 
to indicate to me that there are people out there 
who would like to have a nice shot of this 
character.  Since he's a bit on the rare side, 
however, they may very well be still looking.

I also imagine that I'm not the only person in 
the world who collects cels but has no real 
interest in sketches.

And, finally, I imagine that there are people out 
there who enjoy collecting genga and douga, given 
the number of individual production sketches for 
sale at Yahoo Japan and dealers like Anime Taro.

So that brings me back around to the question.  
Why is there a taboo against seperating a sketch 
from a cel?  It seems to me that if one 
collector only wants the cel, it's pointless and 
somehow cosmically greedy to keep the sketch that 
might make somebody else squeal in delight.

Enlighten me, O Forum Regulars.  How did this 
negative connotation come about?