there would be several distributers of printed comics in the United States. I’d see comics magazines in bodegas, corner stores and drugstores. There would be an even greater proliferation of Japanese and European works available. There would be residency exchanges between countries for auteurs of the medium. There would be grants and residencies for artists working in the medium.
I’d see comic book artists on Charlie Rose. People of note would casually recall something they’d read in a recent issue of a comic book. Popular comics would regularly be a theatre for the discussion of contemporary issues via direct and indirect methods. I’d see comics criticism in comics themselves.
I’d like to see more copyright infringement without repercussions. Smart remixes that question the validity of the ideas in the original materials, new works that masterfully criticize old tropes.
Less conservative approaches to the format of comics. Less comics dogma.
There’d be a desegregation of genre comics, superhero comics, “comix” and art comix.
I’d see more artists wielding the medium as fine art and fewer fine artists mining comics’ aesthetics and culture to prop up weak, derivative work.
The footprint of Marvel and DC Comics on the American comic book shelves would be one weekly jumbo, Manga-like book, respectively; one large book would drop weekly, collecting several stories relative to their tent-pole story arcs (X-whatever book on the first week, Avengers book the next week, etc., respectively), and the narratives would be collected and colored at the end of their runs. The rest of the shelf real estate would be a diverse curation of mostly non-superhero works.
There would be a serious attempt to reach out to people of color. I’d see Fantagraphics publishing “my boring life” works from people of color. I’d see more non-white and non-cisgender comic book editors. I’d see comics left in cafés and subway benches, rolled up in the back pockets of thirteen-year-olds.