Well, the sports card collecting industry has gone down the shitter, and with the implementation of digital, the only real reason for comics to continue to exist (in physical form) is for collectors.
Yes, there is the argument for having paper in your hands, but as someone else said above, the actual time you spend with a single comic is mere minutes, which negates the book argument of reading physical paper (novels take hours to get through).
I'm curious about a couple of things:
1. How many comics today are still being hand drawn as opposed to being drawn digitally with a Wacom or similar.
2. What is the cost differential between printing novels and printing comics--one prints full page color over a smaller number of pages, while the other prints only black text over a larger number of pages. I'd think comics cost a bit more to print.