>>33876
They do certainly try to make it addictive. And stories frequently go on for far too long. But there are endings that are reasonable points to stop, usually at the end of a writer's run. Frankly, the even bigger problem that's related to this, though, is crossovers. You might just wanna read one story, but the odds that it will get roped into an absurdly huge crossover are very high in the last few decades, and then you'll feel obligated to read that. And then there are "tie ins." They tell you you don't need to read all the tie ins, but casuals will certainly feel like they should, and it makes sense, because a lot of times the stuff in the tie ins is relevant to the main story. You want to feel like you're getting the full story, but in order to get to the end of the story you're reading, you gotta read all this other shit, not just in the past, but in the present of the current story. The future is the least of your worries.
One time I was talking to the owner of my local comic book store, and he told me it was the whales that are the ones that usually just end up quitting entirely. It's the people who get roped into the addiction and predatory practices the hardest who eventually get the most fed up and quit cold turkey.
I became one of them for about a year. Or at least I considered myself to be one, spending like $50+/month. But once DC had like three universal crossovers going on at the same time in 2015, it reached a point where I just couldn't justify it, but I felt the need to read everything because otherwise I felt I was missing out on parts of the story. So I just stopped entirely. Now I pirate, or sometimes collect old collections of old comics, if I find them for cheap. Their predatory practices definitely do cost them customers.