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From what I understand 50k is a big selling comic book. The top titles might break into the ~100k range but the vast majority of the books don't come close to that number.
This is driven largely by comic book store pre-orders. Marvel, DC, etc. ship books based on comic book store orders. Makes sense, Marvel and DC ship what they're getting paid more, it's not a consignment business. Comic book stores don't want a bunch of unsold books sitting around their stores without being sold so they lean towards what has a large following already, instead of new untested books.
Relatedly, this is why they put these new ideas into existing titles, not new books. If you introduce a new character out of nowhere, the stores aren't going to order many of them because they're untested. Meanwhile, the publisher still has to pay to have the books created on a national scale. This means that new characters have a very low chance of taking off - few pre-orders and that means they don't make money. The prevailing strategy seems to be to introduce new ideas and characters into books where there is already enough pre-orders to make them profitable.
If the character/idea gains traction then you can roll them out in their own book. If they don't, you can just erase the idea and go back to the previous idea. But the change in sales of the existing book will only fluctuate minutely. Profitability is maintained.
Once I understood just how small a successful run was and how comic book pre-orders dictated that calculation, I stopped wondering why they changed existing characters instead of making new ones. The margins are too thin. This is also why they've put so much time and money into the movie franchises because they're selling more movie tickets than comic books.
