I want to say this plainly: reviews are not a threat to the Black Comix movement. I’ve noticed that this idea is getting louder and more virulent as the community becomes larger. Popular influencers in the space are dismissing critique as just “noise” whose sole purpose is to ruin a good time or derail the entire movement before it gets out of the gate. This simply is not true. In fact, this notion causes more harm than good.

So let’s have a straightforward conversation about what an honest, critical review is actually trying to do, and address the misconceptions that keep coming up. In doing so I believe we’ll uncover the real obstacle that this burgeoning movement is facing: FEAR.

Let’s start with what a review is NOT.

A review is not a “grade.” There’s no red pen, no gold star, no one standing over anyone’s shoulder. Yes, I score what I read, but a number is a compressed opinion, not a verdict, and no score has ever been the whole of what I had to say about a book. But when a review keeps landing on the same crucial errors, that’s not the critic being an obstacle. Execution, design, overall quality: if the same issue keeps surfacing, that’s information. Ignoring it long enough isn’t protecting the work; it’s protecting a workflow that needs a second look. As a critic, I’m also not chasing perfection. I’m reading to understand. I’m hoping the experience leaves me with a real idea, a real opinion, something true. That’s not gatekeeping. That’s the job.

A reviewer doesn’t need credentials. A critic doesn’t need a formal vocabulary of panel theory, pacing, or color theory to have standing. That knowledge can sharpen an argument, but it’s never been mandatory. What a review actually runs on is taste, a developed, considered sense of what works and why. Requiring a technical credential before an opinion counts isn’t really a quality standard. It’s a quieter form of gatekeeping.

A review is not sabotage. When a critical review gets read as an attempt to tear a creator down rather than engage with the work, I don’t think that reading is really about the review. It’s about fear.  Fear of failure, of gatekeeping, of being turned away, or simply not being chosen. Those fears are real and worth taking seriously. But they’re not evidence against the critic. Treating them as if they were is how a movement ends up protecting its weakest work instead of building its strongest.

A review is not a bid for followers or notoriety. I won’t pretend that motive never exists anywhere in criticism. But most intelligent readers aren’t drawn to a review because it’s flashy. They’re drawn to it because the reviewer is willing to say the uncomfortable thing out loud, and risks their own reputation to say it. That’s not attention-seeking. It’s closer to the opposite.

Trust is the actual currency this movement needs to grow: the reader’s trust, the creator’s trust, and the industry’s trust.

Now here’s what a review actually IS.

A review is for the reader. It exists for someone trying to decide where to spend their time and their money, not to decide who belongs in this space. Treating every critical word as an attack on Black comix as a whole doesn’t serve the movement; it tells readers their judgment doesn’t matter, and it tells creators the truth is optional as long as the intent was good. Neither builds trust. And trust is the actual currency this movement needs to grow: the reader’s trust, the creator’s trust, the industry’s trust.

I know this because I’ve spent over 15 years building it. I started my career in this community by founding Peep Game Comix, a groundbreaking digital comic book website dedicated exclusively to Black comic book creators. The site was digital-only, not because digital was cutting-edge at the time, but because I was adamant about building trust with readers. I wanted every transaction to be immediate, with no hiccups, no mishaps, no reason for a reader to hesitate before clicking “buy.” That reliability wasn’t a technical decision. It was the entire goal. Trust between the reader, the creator, and the retailer. That’s the foundation everything else gets built on. A review that tells the truth is doing the same work I was doing back then. It’s not the thing that erodes trust, it’s one of the ways we earn it.

“Avoiding critique doesn’t protect a creator’s career. It just gives the fear somewhere comfortable to sit.”

Embrace your fears

Avoiding critique doesn’t protect a creator’s career. It just gives the fear somewhere comfortable to sit, undisturbed, while the work never gets the chance to improve. If this movement wants to be taken seriously, it has to be strong enough to be read seriously.

Look at my own body of work, and one title stands out: Michael Watson’s Hotshot. No other book, mainstream or indie, has faced this level of sustained scrutiny from me. My critiques of it have ranged from joyous fandom to real disappointment, issue after issue. And yet Watson has never turned away from any of it. If anything, he’s leaned in, giving me early access to each subsequent issue before it even reaches readers. I don’t think Hotshot has gotten better because he agreed with everything I said. It’s gotten better because he kept showing up for the conversation.

That, to me, is the real test of whether a book belongs in this conversation at all: not whether it’s flawless, but whether it can withstand being looked at closely, more than once, without falling apart. Hotshot has now survived years of that kind of attention, and it’s still standing, still improving, still worth the scrutiny. Not every book can say that, and that’s not a failure of the movement. It’s simply a fact about a given book, at a given point in its life. Hotshot’s endurance isn’t luck. It’s what happens when a creator lets the work be tested instead of protecting it from the test.

I don’t think the idea that any critiques are an attack on Black comix serves us well. It builds a false sense of security, where nothing gets better because nothing is ever really examined. If this movement is going to last, it has to be built to withstand scrutiny, not sheltered from it.

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