I'm replying to this again because I think it's important to clarify something about the decline of print comics in the US. The peak of the industry was the early 90s- 1991, 1992, or thereabouts. A lot of blame is placed on the industry catering to speculators and collectors over longtime fans and flooding the market with #1s nobody wanted, expensive hologram covers, etc. By the end of the decade the entire industry suffered a massive collapse and Marvel themselves was near bankrupt. There's SOME truth to this, but the primary cause of the industry collapse isn't "too many speculators" it's a distribution war that Marvel Started.
In 1994, looking to squeeze even more money out of the market than they already had as well as solve some self inflicted issues with debt, Marvel bought the third largest distributor of comics in the US, "Heroes World Distribution" to act as their exclusive distributor of all comic book content. Diamond and Capital City were #1 and #2. This was disastrous for a few reasons:
There were about ten distributors in existence when Marvel bought Heroes World. All of them saw their overall sales drop by up to 40%, but not their costs. Marvel going exclusive meant that virtually all of them were going to go out of business, and Diamond began making aggressive deals to exclusively distribute other non-marvel comic books that Capital City and the others could not match. Capital City made some exclusive deals with a few smaller labels, but this only had the effect of putting those labels out of business.
the other big reason was that Heroes World was a small distributor that in NO WAY was prepared to take on the volume of exclusively distributing the massive chunk of the market that Marvel represented:
Heroes World struggled through 1995 and 1996, before being driven out of existence by lawsuits in 1997 as Marvel returned to Diamond, now the only player left in the print comics industry. Those outlets that weren't forced to close by Heroes World massively screwing up for years found themselves in a TERRIBLE position as Diamond's monopoly meant that costs were now far higher than they had been during the era when distribution was competitive. Making things worse, a viable competitor to Diamond isn't possible- as a "no resale" exclusive clause between Diamond and DC prevents a viable competitor from ever arising. Smaller shops were driven out of business totally by the new Monopoly diamond had, and by the end of the decade nearly 90% of local comic book stores had closed.
There are other smaller issues (Marvel was in a precarious position with a lot of debt and made some bad purchases on top of this) but THAT is the big reason why floppy sales are nowhere near their pre-crash levels, and CAN'T return to their pre-crash levels. A new system needs to be established that doesn't rely on the existing distribution network of Diamond to LCS.