Yeah, he's stupid, it's not the author's fault, if there's anyone to blame it's the publisher. As an employee of any organization, it's not up to your co-worker to seek your best interest, but your boss, if you're feeling sick and under the weather, your co-worker shouldn't feel guilty that they're continuing to put out work because your work happens to be directly related to their output. This is likely the author just feeling guilty because he feels directly responsible for the artist being the one that worked while being sick, but it's up to the org to step in and set bounds. There's a reason why crunch is bad, and this is one such instance, where the workers (both author and artist) are clearly being crunched, but instead of blaming their boss, they can't owing to the work culture in the East as well as building up a relationship of sorts with co-workers also helps companies exploit your feelings by implying "if you don't do it then they have so much more work to do" or "if you don't do it then everyone that relies on your work will not have any pay", the latter is likely what happened here, where the artist is forced into a loop of doing work because the author is pressured to provide more and the author is told that the artist relies upon the commissions he gets per page, so the artist feels guilty and dependant upon the author as long as the author outputs work and the author feels guilty that if he doesn't provide enough work then the artist can't continue making dough. In the end it's an exhausting feedback loop which only profits the company and burns the employee out just like a used battery.