I know nothing about small towns in the US.

I lived in a small town here in Holland and we had our own comics shop which had all types of comics. There were plenty of realistic non-G related comics and even publishers like Dargaud released lots of the more adult oriented comics. 

About the future of comics: I just got my copy of Anomaly. This looks like the future of comics. A printed book with a separate app for augmented reality to bring the figures to life and an interactive ebook/app which uses voice actors and brings additional details to the story.

But this getting a bit away from the original topic of this thread