How Comic Shops Saved American Comics … Then Slowly Killed Them

A persistent zombie meme surrounding the collapse of American comic books pins the blame on a familiar target: the audience.

According to the standard spiel, comics died because normies invaded the hobby. Superhero stories supposedly fell apart once publishers chased casual readers instead of serving dedicated fans.

That argument appears constantly in online debates, especially among older collectors nostalgic for the pre-Cultural Ground Zero era. Yet the history of the medium tells a different story.

American comics weren’t banished to the margins because too many ordinary people bought them.

They were marginalized because ordinary people stopped seeing them.

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