Alan Moore, in an interview published as an appendix to Impossible Territories: The Unofficial Companion to TLoEG: The Black Dossier, has this to say about mainstream comics publishers:
[Comic book publishing] seems to me to be a sort of grubby, third-rate industry that...couldn't really shuck off the sixty-year-old gangster practices and gangster attitudes that it had grown out of...And they have never really bothered to throw off those associations or really those business practices. They've modified them slightly. They carry out their acts of violence in a more subtle and completely legal way, these days.
Should anyone think Moore is over the top with his mention of "gangster" practices, Gerard Jones' Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book discusses and documents (among other subjects) the tight connection between organized crime and some of the founders of American comic-book publishing.