The true causes of the industry's decline were the same ones plaguing it for decades: variant covers and "debut issues" flooding shelves while trying to reel in collectors and speculation reseller whales, stupid crossover events constantly fucking with continuity because of editorial retardation, lack of (actual) diversity of genres that cater to demographics outside of boomers who like capeshit, and the comics themselves being isolated to only comic shops which naturally repel the normies who used to make up the majority of comic sales before the medium mostly became a hobby for "divorced middle-aged dentists" as Meyer likes to say.
CG, comics YT, Zack himself said it at the start: nobody is putting out cheap, mass market, broadly appealing, standalone stories that kids pick up for a few cents of their allowance. Zack (or maybe Perch, I forget) used to do comparisons of old covers with their prices, enter it in the inflation calculator, and show that modern comics were still higher. Sometimes DC/Marvel are charging double the inflation-adjusted price for a comic with fewer story pages.
The problem is CG only had one tool at their disposal, crowdfunding, so they forced their solution to fit their tool. Graphic novels, prestige formats, long form arcs in a single volume, these are
not the return to comics' roots; they're an iteration on the modern offerings. None of them figured out a way to sell cheap monthly floppies, at scale.
(To be fair the route for that was probably closed after the mainstream players froze Zack's books out of store shelves. But if CG was going to be the "direct to consumer" rebel model, it was incumbent on them to build out a B2C channel capable of supporting an industry. Or they could have teamed up with someone like
Alterna Comics, who does exactly that but has a lack of IPs to work with. None of them tried, until Eric July, and now they won't utilize it because of gay drama.)
For all the shit the mainstream industry does, at least they could (mostly) keep their output to a reliable schedule. EVS and Zack couldn't fill out a year's quota of monthly stories in their respective IPs, even if someone else did all the fulfillment work for them.
