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EXCLUSIVE: Don Kramer’s Wonder Woman
DC Comics Has Ruined Wonder Woman!
EXCLUSIVE: DC Comics is already doing a second print run after more than 60,000 copies were snapped up. There will be 100,000 in all for the issue. Downloads of the free issue preview for Wonder Woman #600 though DC Comic’s one-week-old digital publishing app have been “phenomenal”, a source tells me.
Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.
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Every generation evidently will have IT’S OWN Wonder Woman!
So did the 8oz bottles of Jergens at the $.99 store.
sellout is just a marketing trick. you print 2 copies, and the yell: the 1st edition is sold out.
Maybe people like the new design better.
Anyone know the breakdown between male and female?
Thought you didn’t cover comics, Finke
That’s not really a big deal. Comic publishers print very few extra copies than the ones ordered by stores, and a -00 issue, especially one that reboots, is nothing to write home about. 60,000 is a decent number of comics, especially one with a female lead (because they don’t get love in comics,) but “sold out” in comics is something that happens often.
If 60,000 is an earth shattering number, it tells you how few comic book readers there really are. Something to ponder, Hollywood.
Only because people like you hate superheroes and the movies that are based on them-all the better to replace the the same boring Sundance flim shit complete with fracked up characters we’ve all been seeing for the past 20 years.
Be wary of going down this road– comics sales are at an all time low and numbers like these would have gotten Wonder Woman canceled in any decade before the comic industry collapsed in the 90′s.
60,000 is nothing. If those were movie tickets, that would be $6 million. How is this news?
Promoting this failure as if it were a success only helps DC continue this abomination of a make-over they’ve decided to foist on Wonder Woman and the public.
I think what they are doing with Wonder Woman is terrible. William Moulton would turn over in his grave. A good example would be say Supes came from Mars and Batman was raised by Lesbians. Its clear that WB and DC comics have no creative talent. And the new writer is clearly a hack job. So is the gal that did birds of prey a few years back for the ill fated TV series.
How many times has Wonder Woman been rebooted anyway? Like one point she was a kung fu master (eh?) and then back again to a semi-pre reboot status, now its….wow this is giving me a headache.
Wait better question: Why is she always tied up all the time? I mean yeah we mock the idea of Superman always stopped at the convenient time by someone who happened to find yet another chunk of Kryptonite, but there is nothing inherently kinky about that.
I mean even that website Superdickery, making fun of comic book nonsense, effectively self-retired the gags about WW being a S&M fetish freak or always convenient surrounded or targeted by phallic imagery because those jokes got old. Quickly.
So in short, I think I might know why Warner Bros. never went ahead with the WW movie. Remember when producer Joel Silver wanted Sandra Bullock?
To clarify — This doesn’t actually mean that all these copies were actually sold to customers. It just means that all the copies of #600 were “sold” to a retailer.
No (customer) sales numbers for comics exists; the only thing tracked is how many copies are sent to retailers. (These copies are nonreturnable.)
My local comic book shop, for example, still had several copies of this issue left this afternoon. I would guess that most shops have a least a couple on the shelves.
That’s probably not sustainable. Gimmick covers and such appeal to collectors, but by way of comparison Superman comics were selling 2 million per week, at the height of the comic book boom.
Wonder Woman for years sold around 20-30K copies monthly. It would have been canceled years ago save for losing the rights to the character to the Marsten-Moulston estate.
The problem with WW is that the character just does not appeal to comic book readers — men in their late thirties and forties, and not many of them. There are by most accounts fewer than 2,000 comic book shops nationwide. Bookstores only carry Trade Paperbacks, i.e. collected arcs of various characters.
Doing the math, that means about 30+ copies of WW were sold in Comic book shops, not exactly Harry Potter levels of popularity.
It wont last.
This isn’t news. Comics sell out ALL THE TIME. You’d known this if you’d done even the slightest bit research. Idiot.
Shhhh… don’t tell anybody how the direct market works and how retailers largely only order what they can sell… and that a lot of comics “sell out”… shhhhh….
It’s a shame. I was never a big DC guy. I think they are doing great now. Better than Marvel has been doing the past few years. DC actually puts the work into the stories, Marvel has gimmicks supreme and managed to produce one issue of Spider-man that was reviewed as the ‘worst comic book issue of all time’. The bad part…
Well it was written buy the guy who is now writing Wonder Woman. I mean, why would DC choose this guy? His big contribution to Spider-man was just throwing garbage at the readers. I talking about big stuff every other month like Spider-man dies by some ill-defined villian, then after a few months of costume changes and other gimmickery stuff, SPider-man reveals his identity to the world. Then… nothing. Aunt May is sick again. Despite the fact that Aunt May already died he wrote a story (?) where Peter Parker sacrifices his marriage to save his Aunt May. Awful. The worst ever.
A couple things here: first of all, it’s fairly common practice in the comics industry to do smaller-than-necessary prints of books or issues that are expected to sell well, so that they can do a “second print” and get all the publicity that entails. It also leads to inevitable variant covers that hardcore collectors will have to buy, thus shelling out more money for the same material.
Second, while the 100,000 print run is well above the numbers WW had been getting each month (nearly quadruple, I believe), it’s not altogether unexpected for an anniversary issue. WW 600 is a double or triple sized book (I have it on my desk but haven’t read it yet), and features multiple stories and art from many DC artists including the popular Amanda Conner. In other words, the “reboot” is not the book’s only selling point. Many people who don’t regularly read WW would buy the anniversary issue anyway (I myself bought Superman 700 recently even though I haven’t been following the series).
That all having been said, certainly a lot of that number is due to the reboot and all of the hype and publicity it’s generated. But how many of those people stick around long term? I’m not saying one way or the other, just asserting that this isn’t a guaranteed success for the reboot/new costume. It will boost sales for a while, maybe for an arc or two of JMS’ run as writer, but eventually the new audience will whittle back down to the fan base that has kept Wonder Woman going for years– in other words, the ones who HATE the reboot.
At that point, they will reverse direction, re-introduce Wonder Woman classic, and as many have said before me, publicize it as a “return to roots” for the character. Such is the cycle of comics. Anyone who reads them regularly has seen it dozens of times before, and this won’t be the last time either.
Congratulations to DC Comics! Look, all of the major comic book characters routinely go through costume changes and retcon reboots. Captain America was killed off for over year. But Cap came back.
Comics have to shake things up like this. It’s cyclical. In a year’s time, Wonder Woman will be back in her bathing suit.
BTW, it’s really surprising that anyone would think a bathing suit that exposes so much skin makes an effective combat uniform.
Okay, am I the first person to mention the 70′s “liberated” WW, that tried changing her look, getting rid of the star-spangled bathing-bloomers, dropping out of the Justice League, and taking karate lessons?
(To which, ironically, Gloria Steinem raised the biggest public complaints, saying “Give us back our superhero!…She’s all we’ve got!”)
No mystery here:
Comic book peeps COLLECT what they believe will be rare. This one will be rare. Oddities, misprints, mistakes.
They aren’t buying it because it is good. It is just the opposite. They are buying because it is a mistake and won’t last. And they all know it.
If DC reall understood the culture (which they don’t, as evidenced by Wonder Woman’s new outfit), they would know that ordering another print run just negated the first sales, making those first comics less valuable.
Actually you’re wrong….ordering a 2nd run wont have a major effect on the value of the first as they’re treated differently.
People who collect comics will look for the “First printing”…everyone knows the 2nd and 3rd printing have little if any value.
In comics, there’s a difference between sell-in and sell-through.
A sell-out at publisher level means that they have sold in their entire print run to stores, not sold out to customers/readers.
It’s an important point because the comic is still available at comic book specialty stores. We still have at least half of our order available for purchase becase we anticipated this would be a popular comic book.
Nikki,
It may be sold out as the distributor level, but there are plenty of copies on shop shelves. I haven’t seen a shop without copies yet, and haven’t had any reports of shortages at major metropolitan venues.
And the “sellout” happened two days after publication. Something like Death Of Dracula from Marvel was more impressive this week, selling out at the distributor level on Wednesday, hours after going on sale, with a similar percentage overprint.
If I comic only prints orders from distributors than it will sell out instantly every time. The only achievement depends on the level of overprint on top of initial distributor orders – and if that sells out as well.
It’s encouraging, but very common, for titles to sell out in this fashion, especially if there’s a modicum of extra interest. But it’s the equivalent of you reporting that cinemas are full for screenings of movies. This is what *should* happen. And comics have the luxury of doing the equivalent of shrinking the size of the cinemas depending on ticket sales.
Read the preview on my iPad and loved it! Wonder Woman has a new fan!
Just got a nerd hard on, i.e. my pop tarts are done.
Wonder Woman is a pop culture icon. The buzz about her update attracted segments of both casual comic book readers and non-comic book readers to the comic book stores.
In the short term, the buzz may have created a lot of instant interest but Wonder Woman undergoing such a dramatic change overnight won’t get many positive endorsements.