For the record, I feel like "Speculators, Yo" is one of the weakest cop-outs for explaining the abrupt drop in comic sales.
There were plenty of reasons that comic sales plunged off a cliff. Speculation may have been part of it (witness the popularity and rise of Wizard at the time), but this is the period of time that introduced literally dozens of X-men books (including the limited series), and kind of kicked off the trend of doing a storyline as a limited series, alternate covers, foil covers, better paper quality and computer coloring, and along the way the price of a single issue more than doubled over the course of a couple years, and you had the widening introduction of the trade paperback (particularly out of DC/Vertigo).
People cut back on buying because they couldn't keep up. There were so many books that were related that you couldn't keep track. Right now the Batverse has probably got too many titles running, but they've at least partitioned them off pretty well and for the most part stopped the game where a storyline interleaves issues across titles.
The individual comic book issue purchaser in the 1990s found that the industry became hostile toward people who wanted to read storylines and many realized they could just wait for the trade or pick up fills later in bargain bins. Print runs were high enough that there was no scarcity on major titles (overprint). The bubble of readers who were ready to buy anything that had a teenaged mutant ninja in it grew up and went to college, and a lot of them stopped reading. Meanwhile the industry focus on more mature titles prevented young kids from getting into the hobby.
Do you remember what comic shops were like in the 1990s? They were halfway to an "adult bookstore." Most of them were selling foil packs of pornstar cards, and had Lady Death, Dawn, and swimsuit/lingerie issues at eye level for little kids. Image was breaking boundaries having nudity in books. This was that point in time when Magic The Gathering popped up too. You could get a couple packs of cards for the cover price of a single issue of a comic in some cases. Shops these days are not like they used to be. Most of them have morphed into pop-culture stores, and the adult stuff is usually tucked away up high so kids can't get to it or it's otherwise gated. There are ratings on the covers of most issues.
What comics were trying to say was "comics aren't just for kids anymore" but what they were actually saying is "comics AREN'T for kids anymore at all."
It wasn't something you could trust your kid to enter unsupervised, even here in the liberal northeast. It's no surprise the industry crashed. What's crazy is that it survived to the degree it did, and that imprints like Image are still out there, and others have managed to start up like Dynamite.
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