In American comics you often find creators getting wistful about the Lost Land of 50s publishing, with superhero, horror, western, detective, romance etc etc titles abundant (eg. in Watchmen Alan Moore's 'pirate comics' backstory), all of them broadly wiped out by the superhero in the 60s - DESPITE comics since the diversity-era generally selling LESS!
It's one of the things that's odd about the artform - the way superpredators can appear and basically destroy existing diversity (actually one equivalent is to look at the pop charts of 1961/2 vs 1964/5 when Merseybeat annihilated the 50s eclectiverse) even if that diversity was 'better' (commercially too) for the industry as a whole. It's like some bizarre business strategem - instead of growing the market you radically shrink it until your product defines it.
Another proof of the idea is the way IPC/Fleetway totally failed to ever establish a successful sister title to 2000AD - Eagle was probably as near as they came.
― Tom (Groke), Sunday, 10 October 2004 11:28 (nineteen years ago) link