It’s hard to disagree with this…

Tyler Martin, who owns Godhood Comics, wrote that the black indie comic community isn’t one he recognizes anymore: tribalism, gatekeeping, political agendas, where fifteen years ago he found creators uplifting each other and building together. I agree with a lot of it, and I want to add something from my own experience.

In person, I have never had a conflict at a con. Not once. Disagreements have stayed cordial, and mostly people walk up and tell me to keep going. Online is a completely different animal, and it’s worth asking why those two realities don’t match.

Also worth saying plainly, since it gets misrepresented constantly: when I did commentary, my criticism was that I expected more. Not less. I wanted characters with enough depth to stand the test of time instead of leaning on otherness and rehashed concepts. That got spun into anti-blackness, which tells you how binary the space has become.

Black people are not monolithic. I’ve traveled this country. If you stay inside a corner of the internet that agrees with you top to bottom, you’ll mistake it for the whole landscape.