From Dana Steven’s article “The Cannes- winning film that you’ll probably never see”
I used to be a cinephile. Now, I’m a movie critic. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped loving movies—the day that unlikely eventuality ever comes to pass, I hope I’ll have the good sense to quit. But a professional reviewer is, as it were, married to the movies: We wake up with them every day, we expect something from the films we see and owe them something in return. A cinephile, on the other hand, is a romancer of movies, driven by passion and curiosity from one infatuation to the next, free to abandon, excoriate, outgrow, or rediscover whatever drifts her way.
This quote has stuck with me since I read it last week. While comic reviewing/criticism isn’t quite as formal as movie criticism, I think this is a trap a lot of comic reviewers fall into– expecting something from comics and therefore reading everything that’s hot and now rather than experiencing comics and looking to find true discovery in an art form rather than having to give their opinion on the latest and greatest muti-part epic cross-over.