I'm having a hard time with this. EC-era comics had a bigger audience than TV and radio combined. Fuckin' everyone was reading comics. Then in the '50s things got stupid and the comics industry knuckled the fuck under and became the shit landscape of Archie and Batgirl we all know and despise. Frank Miller and Alan Moore dragged that shit out of the gutter but the distance between Miller's Dark Knight and gravel-voiced Michael Keaton and Kim Basinger is three goddamn years and if you were ten when Jack Nicholson played The Joker you're fuckin' 41 now. Fuckin' 81 editions of those four comics. You don't get to pretend you're lone nerds keeping the flame of fandom alight when the fuckin' New York Times reviews your goddamn comic. Comics started incredibly popular. By the time Comics went through their bullshit "I'm so edgy" renaissance they'd been subject to congressional hearings. ComicCon? Fuck off, George Lucas premiered his trailer for Star Wars there in '76. George Reeves is 60 years dead. This idea that comics were ever some pure thing untouched by the creeping tendrils of commercialism is offensively elitist and the fact that Chanistan thinks that somehow shit was cooler on vinyl makes me further question what the fuck you get out of Chanistan.
Frank Miller didn't do anything Dennis O'Neil hadn't done with Batman and Green Arrow a decade before. O'Neil was even his editor on Daredevil, where he started writing and made his reputation. Dark Knight happened because Dick Giordano wanted a Batman comic to wash the Adam West off the perception of Batman and bring it closer to what they'd been doing for years, and Frank Miller was available. The 'bullshit "I'm so edgy" renaissance' was like the Renaissance in the sense that it was 80% hype and 20% changes that had started long before anyone declared a rebirth.