My own suspicion is the bean-counters at the publishers will invest in popular, high-priced talent to kindle or revive interest in a book, then when the book seems to be doing well, they'll put low-budget talent on it to save the bucks and hope they can coast on the rep of the previous good talent to rub off on the lesser ones.
The bean-counters don't make those decisions. And I've never once heard of a publisher deciding that a book is selling, so let's slash the budget.
We've seen it on the Superman books and Superman, by virtue of his place in comics history and visibility, tends to get the dregs of the talent shuffle.
I don't think this is true either. Whatever era of Superman you're thinking of, you may not have liked the creators working on them, but be they Joe Kelly, Roger Sterm, Greg Rucka or whomever, they weren't considered the dregs by any stretch, and weren't being paid bargain rates.
Hey, wasn't that the marketing philosophy of that guy who nearly bankrupted Marvel?
No. The Image guys were extremely well paid. Their beef seemed to me to be more about control, respect and ancillary rights (like, say, getting a share of the money from a Spider-Man T-shirt featuring their art) than about page rate or publishing royalties.
He refused to pay the talent thinking the characters sold themselves so creators were irrelevant.
Not true on at least a couple of counts -- first, the decision to promote the characters rather than the creators had nothing whatsoever to do with bankrupting Marvel, and during that period, top talent was paid insanely well. And I don't think the decision was made by Perlman.
What bankrupted Marvel was corporate finance outside the realm of publishing -- publishing made a profit the whole time, but Marvel was unable to service debt saddled on them by unwise purchases of other companies.
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