Image doesn't pay page rates (some of the studios within Image like Top Cow might, but not Image itself. It pays creators on the back end (i.e. a percentage agreed upon in the contract after the book is published and sold). Dark Horse, BOOM! do page rates and offer creator participation and ownership options (with various different levels of strings/clauses in their contracts, but their page rates are typically lower than Marvel and DC because they are smaller publishers. IDW is in the news about page rates lately as one of the internal memos was leaked from their new publisher saying they only want to pay $200 per page total to all creatives involved (i.e. $200 per page to split between the writer, penciller, inker, letterer, colorist and editor combined), especially on licensed books. The publisher also hints that if creators are paid less but offered royalties, they will be more incentivized to promote their books and IDW can save on marketing costs as well.

James Tynion IV made a conscious effort to create new characters for the Batman mythos when he was on the book yielding characters like Punchline and Clownhunter, Bendis did Naomi, etc. but these were creators who all had steady income streams outside the books they are doing for Marvel/DC and had the luxury of doing so. None of those characters seemed to remain prominent after the writer's tenure on them ended either (though Punchline was just the main antagonist in the recent Gotham City Sirens book DC did that wrapped up this month.

There's a catch 22 at work as well-comic fans seem to perceive any new characters created by a creator for the big 2 as a "Mary Sue" or being part of some woke agenda is the character isn't a straight white male (see all the online reaction to Naomi) and reject the character from the time it is announced and never actually buy the characters in print. Especially if they see the new character as getting attention or marketing at the expense of one of their beloved characters who isn't being featured currently or doesn't have their own book. It's actually a very hostile environment in which to try to create new characters right now, especially since the bulk of marketing anything in comics falls on the shoulders of the creators, not the publishers, and social media is the primary venue to try to promote it and a cesspool of negativity fueled by the toxic segment of fandom. And any book is liable to be labelled a cash grab if it doesn't fit within the narrow band of "acceptable" books to that fanbase.

The biggest problem is that there are simply not enough comic readers out there to make a mass market publishing plan centered on periodicals sustainable, and what readership does exist is mostly nostalgia fueled and focused on existing favorites in terms of characters and titles. Some have suggested the cut down the books they offer to focus on quality not quantity here as well. If they make fewer books, they will get fewer sales because the customer base is so small (and we have had the discussion of why customer base entry began the moment that newsstands decided not to carry comics any more and the comic industry chose to focus on the direct market with it's niche destination based shops as their primary outlet and did nothing to create a new discovery market to replace newsstands and thus ensured they would no longer draw in enough new readers to replace those who aged out, lost interest or died off in the long run). On top of that, they failed to keep up with market changes where the print periodical became a dinosaur format that lost its appeal to the mass market as a whole (not just comics) and only appealed as a nostalgia product to those who grew up with it, a huge barrier to drawing new customers despite the popularity of the content in other formats. Fewer books (and no variants) will simply result in fewer sales to the existing customer base each month. And since the balance of economy of scale is already working against publishers because of the small size of print runs (one of the reasons you do variants is to raise print run totals and keep economy of scale at bay to keep per unit costs manageable), which keeps margins small, you have to move volumes of units to make a line profitable. Moving fewer units also hurts your retail partners who are also working on tiny margins. (Those who have been here a while have seen me remind folks of this before but that $4 comic only nets the publisher $1. Publisher sells it to distributor for $1, who sells it to retailer for $2, who sells it at $4 but also pays shipping on it eating into their margins...some variables for discount % apply but that's the principle of how the distribution market works).

Reducing the size of the lines would mean lower profitability for the line as a whole coupled with a loss of jobs as there are fewer books to make-lower profits and higher costs mean page rates likely have to be cut, which would lead to talent flight to other industries so no it would not result in better books as your best talent would leave the field. Fewer books to sell also means fewer sales for your retailers and since so many comic retailers are barely scraping buy would result in the closure of many shops shrinking your outlets, and reducing your overall sales in the process, which will then also move economy of scale further against you raising per unit costs even more. The only way to combat that is to get an influx of new readers, except the main barrier to that is you have no discovery market for new readers to fond your product (and losing what outlets you have when shops close even though they are not discovery markets to begin with) and you are stuck with a format that has no traction or appeal in the mass market for you to possibly be sold in a place where new readers might be. Young adult graphic novels have been one of the biggest growth markets in publishing over the last decade, but periodicals are not part of that market model, and thus Marvel and DC has missed out on most of the growth of new readers that have been created with it (DC has had some minor success there with books tailored specifically for the youth market but not with their mainline though the compact editions they are rolling out seem like they might get some traction in that market).

The biggest issue as I see it (in my unprofessional personal perspective) is that where comic publishers need to go to find growth and new readers is somewhere existing long term comic readers do not want to go. They are nostalgic readers and want to read the characters they grew up with in the format they discovered comics in and don't want to let go of that. The problem is those readers have been aging out, dying off or changing life circumstances for the last 30 years and there has not been new customers coming in to take their place. Potential new readers don't want that format, don't want to have to go to a destination niche shop to find their books and don't want to wait a month or more between tiny installments of the story. Traditional comic publishers are caught in the middle-it's not cost effective to do 2 lines to try to please both, and picking one of the other leaves a customer base too small now to be sustainable.

Periodical comics keep getting more expensive for a number of reasons-in addition to printing, paper and salary costs rising, the smaller the print runs and the fewer books you print overall, the more economy of scale works against you to increase per unit cost for printing, making margins smaller and smaller. Small press books done outside traditional distribution (crowd-funding con sales etc.) are now reaching the $10-15 per issue mark because of small print runs and high per unit costs. Direct market books are headed into that territory, in the not too distant future (bigger page count issues are already hitting the $7.00 and $9.99 mark in the direct market) which will cause the customer base to shrink more (those prices go against the nostalgic sensibilities of long-term readers who want to pay mass market prices even though comics have become a niche market product).

Fans tend not to give a crap about any of this though as they do not like to think of comics as a business. They don't want to think of creators being horridly underpaid or having their creations essentially stolen from them and exploited for millions of which they never saw a penny. They just want their fix, and that cognitive dissonance between those twe perspectives creates a lot of unrealistic expectations, which leads to a lot of disappointments and bitterness.