Marya Manes was a Vogue editor and covered foreign news for The New Yorker from Spain, Portugal and Italy. She also did government work during WW II.
In 1947 she wrote:
Fifty to 70 million people in these United States read comic books regularly. About 20 million are sold each month and each copy, according to Market Research, may be read by anywhere from five readers to two hundred; these books are rarely thrown away; they are preserved, loaned, "swapped" ad infinitum. Comic books are the addiction of three out of four American homes. In two of these three homes they are virtually the only reading matter. There must be something to them.