As the “audience” shrank fewer and fewer people ruled the success of a title. In the days of Lee and Kirby, for instance, 200,000 units sold pretty much represented 200,000 readers. A title could lose 10,000 readers and the result would not be devastating.

But in the context of the DSM and the spreading speculator mentality, that same 200,000 might mean 50,000 people each buying 4 copies. If 10,000 stepped away the sales would plummet.

This mentality also led to people continuing to buy titles even after they had lost interest due to a drop in quality. “I have to keep buying in case it gets good again. I don’t want a hole in my collection!” Of course, this reduced the likelihood of a book “getting good again”, since the publishers had no way of measuring who was buying what, and why.

Couple this with those retailers who ordered what THEY liked, often ignoring the needs of their customers, and we see the marketplace becoming ever more obsessed with artificially “hot” books.

As comic shops began sprouting up, publishers realized this approach was a way to save certain low-selling titles from cancellation. Since the product that went to the DSM was non-returnable, it was pure profit for the publishers.

Of course, it didn’t take long for those publishers to see this Golden Goose approach could be applied to all the titles, and the DSM was transformed from an aftermarket to the main venue. Profits soared, even on low selling product.

But this radically altered the shape of the marketplace. Never before had the retailers been allowed to dictate what they sold. Almost overnight the buying audience shrank from a few hundred thousand to tens of thousands. The success or failure of product was now dictated by what the shops ordered, not what potential customers might buy.

And when the bloom went off the DSM due to speculators realizing the books they were hoarding were never going to be really “worth” anything, shops went out of business and it became an actual chore to seek out the “local” comic shops, sales plummeted. This time with no safety net, siince traditional venues had been abandoned.