Picking up the pieces

Things started to go wrong for the mainstream comics industry after the end of the 1960s. British titles quickly declined in circulation, and either folded, merged together, or became reliant on reprint strips. American comics had rallied well after the Code, but had never reached pre-Code levels of sales: now they too went through a slump. It was a crisis, and indeed, remains a crisis to this day - despite the growth of a new market in the 1980s based on specialist 'fan-shops', the newsagent market has yet to recover. Sad to report, in the mid-1990s, comics constitute a barely noticeable presence on newsagents' shelves.
One possible reason for this depression was the rise of television. The connection is hard to prove, but it has been argued that the advent of the various stages of television's evolution (black-and-white TV in the 1960s, colour in the 1970s, home video and interactive computer games in the 1980s and 1990s) corresponded with the decline in comics. Of course, the rise of one medium does not automatically spell the wane of another (any more than the growth of comics destroyed the traditional novel), but at the very least it meant that there were more leisure options for people to choose from. There were, however, other reasons for the malaise, and these largely came down to the nature of the comics themselves.