Please forgive the long post!! But I have a lot of thoughts about this, because I also can feel weird about the porn I've drawn, but it's also kind of complicated. It's super fulfilling and I LOVE attempting to press people's kink buttons. But it's a lot easier to be self-depreciating and be like "ah nobody likes this weird smut"
Though I WILL SAY
If you're making the Weird Kink Art, you're the one affirming others, right? But nobody's gonna whisper in your ear that this is actually good and you aren't going too far with this one etcetc
BUT ALSO
I kinda feel like I'm not allowed to leave smut behind, even if I don't intend to abandon it. Like..I don't want to be seen as primarily a smut artist anymore, because it has these associations - and I'm including positive ones here - that people will bring into anything with your name on it. If you got known for doing porn and moved on to make like...landscape paintings, people who know your name are just going to see it as a pervert quietly sneaking into the landscape scene. Or just constantly bring up your porn art so that nobody will ever see the art on its own merits.
It can be conflicting and frustrating because not everything is horny!! Like, if people have a Horny Feeling for something in my comic, that's more than fine, that's someone engaging and having feelings and I love it! But when people talk as if they assume I'm getting off on what i'm drawing in the comic...it bothers me.
I want to be given a chance to shoot my shot and achieve what I want to do with this long-term story. I don't want to have to justify a lack of erotic intent. I even used two of the characters in an erotic setting once and what I discovered is...that's not what I want them to be. It didn't feel right. Those two puzzle pieces got into the wrong box. Frankly if I could wipe it from peoples' memory, I would. (I should have made identical but separate characters, thinking about it. Dammit.)
Besides, I wanna be accessible, I don't want people who aren't into my other stuff to feel like they're just listening to me pretend I'm not getting off. In fact, I'm currently threading the needle with the throwaway strips I've been making lately, and I think it illustrates added difficulty well. It's a bunch of jokes about a succubus! And she's trying to be alluring, and if the reader sees it as intentionally titillating, it ruins the joke of her just being some mindless predator animal mimicking "sexy" in the least erotic way possible. I've talked about this and similar difficulties to friends before, and the usual reaction is to ask why I don't just let it be horny, which is very frustrating.
I have no resentment for my porn art. I actually miss doing it, and I'm excited to work on a horny tf commission. But like honestly? I get why someone would look back on this thing that's going to stick to them and cringe and overreact. No penis is going to look so good that you're willing to trade away any non-penis artistic ambitions. And sometimes it feels like you already made that trade.