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Which is precisely what Marvel and DC have been doing for forty years.

You’re too young to remember when comics were EVERYWHERE. Not just newsstands, but drugstores, grocery stores, bus stations, train stations. Anywhere people might buy spontaneously. A time, in other words, when buying comics did not require a special trip to a specific location.

The Direct Sales Market (DSM) was conceived as a way for dealers to build up stocks of back issues. It was not meant to become the primary sales venue. But it did not take long for publishers to see that NON-RETURNABLE sales to the DSM were 100% profit. They didn’t have to worry about shipping 600,000 units to those other venues, only to see half returned. Sell-through was the concern of the shops, not the publishers.

Which had the effect of turning a broad based market into a niche market. Just what you describe.

And it only got worse. As the DSM took over as primary venue, the clubhouse mentality became more and more dominant. “Firewalls” went up around the hobby. Increasingly potential readers had to ask “what’s a good jumping on point?” Every issue as a first issue for somebody was a lost concept.

The comicbook market became the living embodiment of the old joke about the Wogga-Wogga bird, which flies in ever decreasing circles until it disappears up its own………