It was announced yesterday, June 30 for those in the mysterious future, that that the current run of DC Comics Wonder Woman, written by famed comic book scribe Brian Azzarello, would be ending with the October issue. Beginning in November, the book would be written by Meredith Finch, and drawn by her more well known artist husband, David Finch.
Now, on the surface this is the sort of thing that happens all the time, one creative team leaves, another takes over. Normally a book changes direction slightly under the new team, growing more divergent the longer the new team in in charge of the book. Occasionally, normally due to lagging sales, a book will immediately distance itself from the prior creative team and stories will immediately go off in a very different direction.
For those of you who haven't been reading the current run of Wonder Woman (boy have you been missing out), the current run has focused heavily on Diana's (Wonder Woman's real name) mythic roots. In his 3 years on the title Brian Azzarello has made large swaths of the Greek pantheon (or their proxies) major supporting characters, but he's also retconned Diana's origin to make her the bastard daughter of Zeus himself and (this one counts as a spoiler) made her the God of War after killing off the old God of War during a confrontation with Zeus's first bastard son. The run has consistently found ways to keep Diana out of the standard superhero game, and focused on keeping Zeus's final illegitimate child (Zeus has vanished and is presumed dead) from falling into the hands of Zeus's First Born or the other Greek gods who would wish him ill.
This take on Wonder Woman has drawn both acclaim and scorn from various groups of readers. While some fans have praised Azzarello's take for getting Diana back to her mythic roots, and its consistently engaging plot twists, others have been up in arms over the retcons to Diana's origins as well as the implication that the Amazons could be called rapists and murderers for how they continue to propagate their ranks. Some have championed the fact that the book has kept Diana out of the way of contradictions with her appearances in Justice League and Superman/Wonder Woman, while others cry for Diana to get back to being a superhero.
For the former, the announcement of Azzarello's exit and Meredith Finch's take was met with sadness and anger. For the latter, it was met with excitement.
In the initial announcement, in USA Today, for the Finches run of Wonder Woman we're told that "The Finches want to branch off and focus on who she is — her interpersonal relationships and her responsibilities to the Amazons and her fellow heroes in the Justice League." While this doesn't come out and say it, the implication is very strong that Wonder Woman is going right back to her status quo before Azarello's New 52 reboot of the character. Gone will be Hera, Hephaestus and Hermes, and instead we'll get a regular old round of Wonder Woman battling people like The Cheetah with the help of people like The Flash or Green Lantern.
Fans of Pre-New 52 Wonder Woman appear to be happy about this new direction, to the dismay of fans of the current run, but there appears to be some fairly substantial potential problems with directing Diana right back to the old status quo.
SALES WOES
Before the sales of Wonder Woman from March of 2010 (this is before the book began it's high profile but fan loathed Odyssey storyline, which gave it a noticeable sales bump) the book sold 25,239 units. In March of 2014, the current run sold 32,035 units. While this is down from 51,402 books the title was selling 6 months after DC's New 52 sales bump (which bolstered sales on almost every title from the publisher) it's still nearly a 25% sales increase over 2010 sales. (For comparison, Superman sold 33,337 in March 2010, 35,266 in March 2014 and 66,588 in March 2012).
It would appear that the current run of Wonder Woman is clearly attracting readers who were not reading/interested in reading Wonder Woman prior to her more mythic reboot. While its undeniable that there are readers who abandoned the current run who may have read it prior to the New 52 reboot, the fact that the current run has maintained a higher number of readers (and unlike Superman hasn't nearly fallen back its pre-New 52 sales numbers) indicates that the current run is attracting a significant number of new readers.
Now, it is impossible to say how many of those readers will abandon the title after the focus shifts versus the number that return to the title, however it seems likely that the title will take a hit in readership when it returns to it's old status quo. In order to theorize that the book won't lose a significant number of readers, the question must be answered "Why weren't they reading Wonder Woman the last time this was her status quo?" Now there are a theoretically infinite number of answers to that question, but one of the chief answers is likely to be that the character wasn't that interesting.
This brings me to the next problem
WONDER WOMAN IS WHO, EXACTLY?
Wonder Woman is clearly one of DC's most iconic characters. Everyone knows her on sight, though she's still less recognizable than Superman or Batman (but more recognizable than, say Green Lantern). Despite this, Wonder Woman having much less of a developed world around her, and suffering through numerous attempted reinventions that never worked to attract readers.
Lets try something...
Think about Batman. What do we know about him, his persona and his rogues gallery? A heck of a lot. We know he's dark and brooding. We know that he's a creation of vengeance, but that he doesn't kill (and hates guns). We can rattle off villains like Joker, Riddler, Two-Face, Penguin, Bane, Poison Ivy, etc.
Think about Superman. What so you know about him and his rogues gallery? He's an alien, who was raised to be a wholesome farm boy. He's honest and upstanding. He's a "big blue boyscout", who must protect his secret identity from Lois Lane, who's in love with Superman but doesn't think a whole lot of his bumbling secret identity Clark Kent. You think of Lex Luthor, Bizarro, Doomsday, Brainiac, etc.
Now, not all of those things may be 100% accurate. But, you had a fairly good idea of the character and his world. That's probably informed by the various movies and cartoons of the last 60 years, but even those were at least partly informed by the actual comic books.
Now, think about Wonder Woman. What can you remember about her? She's an Amazon. She has (or had) a relationship with a pilot named Steve Trevor. She has a lasso of truth. Maybe that she was made out of clay, and brought to life by her mothers wish (though that's stretching it for someone who hasn't been reading the books). Her villains include Cheetah, Giganta and....
Notice there's not a whole lot there that's actually about her character. Now, you may be tempted to say that she's a feminist, and you'd be half right. Wonder Woman has never backed down, nor bowed to a man in any sort of modern version of the character (though she started out as secretary of the Justice League), but it's hard not to really apply that to most modern female characters. Yes, the feminist movement really latched onto Wonder Woman, but that doesn't necessarily make her more or less feminist than, say, Batwoman or Captain Marvel.
The fact is that most people remember Wonder Woman as either Lynda Carter, or as a cartoon character with an invisible jet. Neither was a faithful depiction of the character.
As far as the comics go, there's not a whole lot about Wonder Woman that's instantly iconic other than her appearance. So, what is the status quo really going back to?
Worse, in current New 52 canon, Wonder Woman has already been cast as Superman's girlfriend (something that's barely even been mentioned in Azzarello's run). That implication is bound to taint any run of the character that is more focused on her interactions with the core DCU, especially how heavy the focus has been in the other books she appears in (Justice League and Superman/Wonder Woman). So, the status quo Wonder Woman is devolving back into a role carved out for her in Justice League rather than her own solo title.
The fact that Azzarello took Diana back to her mythic roots in order to define her plays into a similar, and very successful, strategy that Marvel implemented for Thor. In the modern stories about the character, his alter ego Dr. Donald Blake is gone, leaving only the god who tackles godly problems. This sort of take on the character fits the general tone of DCU characters, who are gods among men (as opposed to Marvel where most heroes, save Thor, are average people with powers). It seems almost backward to revert Diana into a character dealing with potential "real world" issues rather than the god among men she literally is.
MOVIE MANIA
There's been a lot of implication among fans the reverting Wonder Woman back to her general superhero status is a result of DC's anticipation of Superman v Batman: Dawn of Justice, and that may be partly to blame. It's not at all unusual for comic book publishers to put a character back in a position that mirrors the movie being released featuring them. Spider-man 3 comes out with the black costume, Spidey is suddenly wearing it in the comics. Captain America gets a movie, Steve Rogers returns from the dead and picks up the shield. Bane is in Dark Knight Rises, suddenly Bane is fighting Batman in the comics.
It's a fact of life.
The problems with a hard refocusing of the character to suit the upcoming film are two fold.
First, the film isn't coming out until May of 2016, that's a year and a half from the change in creative teams, which is more than enough time to ease the focus back toward super heroics, without making it seem forced. Moreover, most comics tend to link into their films with a storyline or two, not by completely refocusing the character. It seems overkill to ignore the currently improved sales in anticipation of increased sales 18 months later, which leads me to...
Secondly, comic books rarely take much of a bump from comic book movies. It's a sad fact. Given the difficulty of the average person getting their hands on a comic book, sales simply don't increase dramatically when a comic book movie is released. Most people don't know where their local comic shop is, so they don't go there after saying "Man that Thor movie was awesome!" If any sales do increase, it tends to be trades, which are widely available in bookstores and on Amazon. By the time the movie hits, fans are likely going to be buying trades of the Azzarello run, as they were buying Winter Soldier trades when the new Captain America was released.
In Conclusion
If nothing else, numbers do not lie. While comic book sales have declined since 2010, with bumps for events such as the New 52, the current sales of Wonder Woman are above what they were prior to the relaunch. Combine that with the fact that the current run has taken great pains to define the character and her surroundings in a memorable way that is able to stand independent of the various cross-overs (or ill conceived events such as Forever Evil) and provide potential story material for years to come, and the notion of redirecting Wonder Woman back into her pre-New 52 groove simply seems like an ill advised decision.
I don't say any of this to insult the Finches, who I'm sure are fine people and have a lot of ideas for the character that excite them, or DC comics. I'm simply saying it as a geek who looks at the numbers and the information available to him and sees the current move as a bad one.
While the public has clamored for a Wonder Woman film for years, they do so without a firm grasp on the character. While it's not impossible to reestablish a character in a very different direction after a strong creative run, it isn't an easy task and more well known and well regarded writers than Meredith Finch have failed at it.
I'm sure Ms. Finch will give the book 110%, but that doesn't necessarily mean that her creative course for the character is the right one. It entirely possible, probable in fact, that the decision to redirect Diana back to normal superherodom is an editorial mandate (similar to the one that made Spider-man sell his marriage to the devil), and that Ms. Finch was chosen because her take simply fit what the editors were looking for.
Still, I can't help but be wary of such a decision, and I think other readers should be took. Given that there are numerous, more well established and lauded female writers who, I'm sure, have their own takes on Wonder Woman, it seems odd that a relative unknown such as Meredith Finch would be handed the book as opposed to, say, Gail Simone or Kelly Sue Deconnick.
This isn't helped by the fact that, while generally acclaimed by readers, David Finch tends to draw female characters in a fairly waify and sexualized way, which runs counter to what most Wonder Woman fans desire out of the character. The released artwork, posted above, seems to confirm that Diana will not be drawn as athletic, but as thin and youthful looking.
I'm not completely writing the series off, because I do want Wonder Woman to succeed and grow in readership. However, I'm not going to continue to buy a book I'm not enjoying. I'll give the Finches till the end of the year, perhaps even January, to convince me the new direction is one worth going in. If they can't do that, I'll have to part ways with Diana until I see a change in the book that draws me back.
In the mean time, can we rally DC to get the artist who did this picture of Diana onto the book? Unlike in Finch's style, this WW looks like a realistically proportioned Amazon. I would believe she could take Superman in a fight.
