Has a change in the availability of old comics contributed to the reduction in sales of new comics?

Has a change in the availability of old comics contributed to the reduction in sales of new comics? When I was a kid, with a weekly subscription to ?Mighty World of Marvel?, the only thing I could know about the Hulk et al was what that week?s issue told me. I never saw a back issue older than the first issue I bought because there were no comic shops or dealers or internet. I didn?t have any awareness whatsoever of when my favorite comic might have started or what it used to look like ? mind you I was, ahem, only seven at the time. Even so, I would have given my right arm for old issues, but they were simply not there to get. Anyway, nowadays a new comic book cannot enjoy this luxury ? it is competing in a real sense against the entire back catalog of the publication because now that eBay and reprints are around, it is as easy, more or less, to read Hulk from 1963 or 1973 or 1983 etc. etc. as it is to read this month?s issue. I wonder how much this has affected sales of new comics, if at all. I know I started buying Hulk again a couple of years ago, but quickly stopped in favor of spending the money on older or collectible issues, which were better, but then I would say that wouldn?t I :-). Today awareness of past stories must have gone up dramatically among readers, so that nowadays if you kill a character, for example, everyone is aware of when and how they have already died in the past. Is the past now a horrible inertia for present comics? In the seventies, unless you?d been reading a title for a long time, you just wouldn?t know, and wouldn?t have access to information about, the details of the back story, so presumably writers could repeat themes again and again and they would seem fresh. Perhaps this is rather obvious but I wonder if it's had an impact. If it has I suppose the answer would be to embrace the old and start printing back issues from the forties through seventies on a month-to-month basis, or come up with some entirely new superheroes whose past cannot catch up with them.