Judging the New 52 #2: Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman has always been a character I've enjoyed, despite DC Comics regularly failing to provide a decent comic for her over the years. She is also a character I was particularly keen to examine the sales figures of, as her relaunched New 52 title was one of the more unusual of the set. Writer Brian Azarrello and artist Cliff Chiang have produced a Wonder Woman steeped less in superheroes and more in Greek mythology, and one tonally distinct from the New 52 and more in line with DC's mature readers Vertigo imprint.

I was ambivalent about the relaunched Wonder Woman at first, as Azarrello stripped away a very cool origin (Diana being created by Amazons out of clay - a woman born by other women and not by a man) and replaced it with a much more stereotypical one (Diana is one of the many illegitimate children of the god Zeus). The fact this change was made by an all-male creative team made it seem even less palatable. Over the past 10 issues, however, I've been sold: this is a bold, interesting take on Wonder Woman and I'm finding myself increasingly keen to read each issue as it is released.

While it's a good comic, it is still an unusual one: how has this affected sales?

Very well it seems. As with Batman I have compared the first 10 issues of the relaunched Wonder Woman with the last 24 months of the comic prior to the New 52. Prior to the relaunch Wonder Woman was selling an average of 31,658 copies each issue. If you remove the high-selling #600 from those numbers and the average slips down to 30,707. The average sales post-relaunch have been 60,100 - so almost twice as well. Note that the sales are declining issue-on-issue, however; this is standard practice for serialised comics, which is why the publishers (whether DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, or whoever) regularly swap creative teams, launch big stunt arcs ("The Death of Superman", "Knightfall", et al) or renumber the titles. The earlier post-#600 bump, for example, was due to the high-profile relaunch of Wonder Woman by writer J. Michael Straczynski, in which the character was made younger and less experienced, and given pants.

It's interesting that sales increased from the first issue of the New 52 Wonder Woman to the second, before dropping sharply. I think this is probably due to the fairly strong acclaim the first issue received, leading to a few new readers checking it out, but it is a very distinct comic that won't be to all tastes, hence the sharp drop in the third and fourth issues. (EDIT: the incomparable Wolverina points out very sensibly in the comments below that stripping Diana of her feminist origins and replacing it with one that fits a rich tradition of marginalising female characters may have had more to do with it. It's a fair point.)