If you are going to compare the economics of the comic buying demographic of how it used to be to now, there are a number of factors that need to be considered.

• Look at competition for the child entertainment dollar - there are a lot more things out there that kids can buy. Card games, video games, DVDs, and more are competing for the exact same market.
• The number of households with two working parents - childeren in day cares mean less time to be playing around town
• Consider crime rates and the number of childeren in day care - how often you do you see kids allowed to play far from home where they are in a position to go to a grocery store or place like that on their own that could sell comics.
• Suburban sprawl - The farthe we go, the more difficult buying becomes.
• Literacy rates
• Kids becoming interested in the opposite gender at an earlier age
• Greater variety of after school activites
• Shorter attention spans
• Greater access to the Internet

Yes comics have changed, but so has our society.  I just think it takes a lot more study to say why the comics industry has declined than they are different, because everything is different.

This is a difference of culture here.

David, you say French people consider comics books as an Art ( the 9 th one ). But you forget some few points in your arguments:

when they created the Comics books convention of Angouleme ( for our American fellows, this is the most famous and established one in France ) in the 70's, people just looked at it as a " kiddy picture fair ". But a group of comics books artists tryied hard to make it change, Bretecher, Gotlib, Mandryka, Dionnet. Only in the 80's with the visit by then French President Francois Mitterrand and with a great help from the Arts and culture minister Jack Lang, French people looked at it more seriously. But it was only until the late 80's / early 90's that comics books was recognize as an Art form, officially. All the way long, a lot of creators have had a hard time to make sure this goal was not forgotten. And hey, The CNBDI ( National Centre for Comics Books and image ... the only museum dedicated to comics book in France opened just a little bit more than a decade ago.

So, the recognization as an Art form is quite recent.

Then again, the samples of top sales you are indicating are on some big names  and established characters, along with few " successful specials cases". As I mentioned in the other thread " Europe ", there are more and more new titles on the shelves ( I don't even include the direct publication of Manga stuff, supposedly 1/3 of the shelves in the shops... but can't confirm on this one ). Some may see this as a positive point, but a lot of my comics books friends consider this with care. This booming makes the life of the comics much shorter, and unlike the American way of doing comics ( to make it short: different creators on the same character with publishing titles every month ), the French way ( the same artist / or group of artists  on the same and unique character/book on a limited number of hard cover issues with a frequency of one a year, more or less) is having big troubles to survive.

I have a friend who was supposed to do a 4 part 44 pages stroy arc, but the publisher decided to end the whole thing at the end of the 3 rd book ( yep, really no hope of any end of that story anytime soon ).

I have some other friends who try to propose stuff but the requierments in terms of quality and sales are really challenging.

Nowdays, publishers may have less problem to publish  a book, but if it doesn't sale good, it goes axed much faster.

It is true that French comics books artists are more driven by passion for that form of expression than for money. And it is true that stuff from the underground comics have more chance to be recognized. But the health of the comics in France is just a big ballon who may explode any time.

As for the comics books in Hong Kong, well, they have had a peak period in early 90's, and now the figures are much down, but still it is healthy. Recently, they were complaining about some kind of "illegal " comics books library who were making them loosing big time money by not paying back some percentage.

Hong Kong comics is in its format much closer to the American style ( comics monthly, weekly ) but made by a studio ( like in Japan ).

And to answer to someone question asked earlier, some comics succeed to make it on the English market. But, once again it is pretty difficult for them, because as common people will say around in France... American people only read super-heroes.