Since we're talking about old comic history and economics...
Yesterday I listened to an hour long podcast interview of Roy Thomas talking about the origins of Conan at Marvel Comics.
Super insightful stuff and we are lucky to have some of these great older luminaries still around and coherent enough to recount the past with such vivid detail.
Regarding artists, he said that the first guy he chose for Conan once Stan Lee agreed to publish the book was John Buscema, but his page rate was too high ($50/page at the time) and he was busy with a lot of Marvel's cape books. Apparently, Buscema wanted to draw Conan more than anything and he didn't like drawing superheroes at all but he couldn't justify working below his market value for a passion project that had no clear stable future.
Then Thomas wanted Gil Kane, who was apparently a huge cheerleader for a Conan comic when Marvel was still considering the idea, but his page rate was too high as well.
So Thomas decided to ask Barry Smith, who was living in England at the time and not doing much of anything, and his page rate was significantly lower so he agreed to do it.
Stan Lee sounds like quite the character. He was kind of a spectacle in public according to Thomas. When the creatives were in a public space discussing a project and Stan was among them, Stan would get up and pose dynamically, using furniture to help him with positions, angles and leans and was quite enthusiastic about demonstrating what he was looking for on covers and splash pages.
Apparently one of Stan's frustrations with the Conan comic was the number of animals Conan was fighting on the covers. According to Roy, he would say 'get these damn animals off the covers and have Conan fighting men of menace on them! You got a spider and a snake with a person's head and a tiger woman. It's not even a tiger man!' The next issue after that conversation, Conan's enemies were skeleton warriors and a giant insect.
Lastly, the first seven issues of Conan had declining sales and Lee wanted to cancel the book not because the numbers justified it (it was still selling well, but declining numbers issue to issue isn't a good sign) but because he wanted to put Smith on a different book. Roy argued for the survival of the book and he got to keep Smith up through issue 13. Gil Kane came in and illustrated a couple of issues and expressed frustrartion at the level of effort required to draw what Thomas was writing. Kane said it was exhausting having to draw an epic every issue and it was too much work. Roy, of course, argued that if you're going to do a book like this, every issue has to feel epic.
Smith came back after Kane's two issue stint and worked on the book for a few more issues but by that point Conan's sales were skyrocketing and the book was making real money. At that point, Stan gave the go ahead to put Buscema on the book, since the profits justified his page rate, and the rest is history.
Love old comic stories.