US public EV charging stations

Somewhere in the vast indifference of the cosmos, a force has decided that Americans' appetite for illustrated narratives about people in capes must expand at precisely the same rate as their need to plug vehicles into roadside boxes, and this correlation is so pristine—0.98, practically a love story—that one begins to suspect the universe is not just absurd but actively trolling us. It says something deeply human that we are willing to believe these two things are mysteriously connected rather than simply admit that both are symptoms of the same underlying condition: us, always wanting more of something.

The real culprit is almost certainly economic expansion and population drift toward urban and suburban centers between 2010 and 2022. As Americans got richer and more distributed, they spent more on discretionary purchases: both graphic novels (suddenly respectable, suddenly everywhere, suddenly $25 a pop for prestige editions) and EV infrastructure (suddenly politically important, suddenly subsidized, suddenly inevitable). Consider that the comic market grew from about $375 million to $1.3 billion in that span—a 250% increase—while charging stations went from roughly 500 to 50,000, and both curves ride the same wave of millennial disposable income meeting green anxiety meeting the slow death of shame about reading picture books as an adult.

What we are really watching is two different industries hitching a ride on the same economic tailwind, a phenomenon so common that it barely qualifies as coincidence yet somehow remains invisible until we plot it on a graph. Neither caused the other; both were merely passengers in a car that happened to be driving forward. The universe is not speaking to us through EV charging stations and comic books—we are simply very good at listening to silence and hearing what we want to hear.