Exactly 30 years ago, the world was bracing itself for one of the most eagerly anticipated comic book movies in over a decade: Tim Burton’s Batman. Back then, ​films based on comics were few and far between, and there had been virtually nothing new to excite fans in America and most other Western countries. The Superman franchise ended with a whimper, 1987’s Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, and Marvel wasn’t having much luck with it strictly low-rent, made-for-TV movies, like 1988’s The Incredible Hulk Returns.

The problem was that movie and television screens simply couldn’t compete with comics’ unlimited special effects budget. For the price of a pencil, pen, paper, and some color ink, comics could depict any scene—from a quiet discussion between two people to an epic intergalactic battle—at virtually no cost, save for the creator’s time. In a movie, a major scene would cost a fortune, so for those truly magnificent battles, fans would need to keep returning to the comics.

Then in the 1990s special effects went digital. Relatively economical CGI completely revolutionized the need for physical effects’ expensive sets, dangerous pyrotechnics, and time-consuming prosthetics. All bets were off. Comics’ static, silent images paled in comparison to the cacophonous Technicolor big screen spectacles.

Reading comics for pure spectacle became redundant, and both Marvel and DC soon realized that their role as publishers was no longer to produce comics and graphic novels but rather to maintain the profile of their intellectual properties and to feed their cinematic brethren with new story ideas to be developed into films: Batman v. Superman, Captain America: Civil War, and X-Men, all of which owe their origins to classic comic book story lines. Superhero comics themselves had almost become irrelevant, merely flashy storyboards for cinematographers to lift from. So where did this leave comics as a medium?

Well, fortunately, since the 1960s there has been a strong underground comics movement that rejected the mainstream superhero output that accounted for about 90% of titles published in North America. Creators and publishers interested in pushing the medium realized that focusing on a single genre was a dead end. This movement truly started to find its audience in the mid-1980s when hundreds of independent publishers started releasing their comics through the growing direct market of comic shops. This meant diverse, quirky titles such as Flaming Carrot, Cerebus the Aardvark, Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles all became financially viable. This explosion was followed by the inevitable implosion, but the seeds had been sown.

Fantagraphics Books had been pushing for a “new mainstream” since its foundation in 1976 by Gary Groth and Mike Catron. Fantagraphics was always ardently anti–caped crusader, paving the way with social realist tales such as Love & Rockets by Jaime and Gilbert Hernadez. They, and others, resolutely stuck to their guns, waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with them—which it did, as comics slowly wound their way into bookstores.

Jump to today, when 22 major superhero feature films are slated for the next two years. How can comics combat this lure for readers’ attention?

Undoubtedly it’s a fool’s errand to try to out-pizzazz the moving picture, so comics have been looking inward to their core strength: telling smaller, quieter stories that delve into the interior world of characters. Comics are excellent at exploring first-person narratives, particularly when those narrators are unreliable, with the captions deliberately contradicting the visuals.

Another of comics’ strengths is conveying complex concepts in very simple, economical, graphical ways. This has led to a sharp rise in nonfiction graphic “novels.” Daryl Cunningham’s critically acclaimed Supercrash and Science Tales, for Myriad Editions, explore the events leading up to the financial collapse in 2008 and “lies, hoaxes, and scams” in science, respectively. Another publisher that moved into nonfiction is the U.K.’s SelfMadeHero, which published Edward Ross’s Filmish and last year’s exploration of the Moon landings Apollo by Matt Fitch, Chris Baker, and Mike Collins. Autobiographies and biographies are also currently very popular.

And if the French and Japanese markets continue to foreshadow the English graphic novel market, look for titles on cooking, wine tasting, business studies, and pretty much any topic you can imagine. My own publishing house, Soaring Penguin Press, even produced a successful biography-cum-history graphic novel about Hornsey Town Hall in London titled The Voice of the Hall, by Sean Azzopardi.

So cinema can keep its capes, while the new mainstream of graphic novels looks set not only to stay but to thrive. After all, success relies on the diversity of readers’ tastes for a multitude of genres, and some comics publishers have always known this. It’s just that it took the rest of the world a while to catch up.

Tim Pilcher is an Eisner-nominated writer, editor, and publisher and is the co-owner of the U.K.’s Soaring Penguin Press.