9. The Direct Market Exploded
Okay, so this one isn't
actually comics themselves... but if you grew up in the 80s & 90s like I did you probably take the direct market for granted, and the local comics shop is a fairly recent development that owes a lot (both good and bad) to the boom of the 90s. The newsstands of late 1970s America couldn't handle the amount of fanboys being born daily so someone got the bright idea that maybe comics should have their own store. By the 90s they were popping up everywhere, even the local mall. A large part of why readers had so many choices was because specialty shops existed that could stock the books newsstands owners didn't think would sell. With the true advent of the comic shop, you suddenly saw books that you didn't even know existed (all of the mature reader fans out there know what I'm talking about). Sadly, many of these Nerd Temples have since closed but we'll forever have the memories of that magical time when there was one on every street corner.