Wonder Woman Vol. 2 Sales Figures

Circulation as Reported in Publishers' Statements of Ownership
Filed with the United States Postal Service

Created by William Moulton Marston in All Star Comics #8, Wonder Woman got her own series in 1942 — a title that would run for more than four decades. The title's first postal circulation data appears in 1960, when the book was shipping eight issues a year; 210,000 copies of each issue sold on average. That number makes it a lower-tier superhero book at DC in 1960, but a mid-range seller for the industry overall.

The title's circulation remained steady through the early 1960s, but suffered in the second half of the decade as DC cut its frequency to bimonthly. Sales improved slightly heading into the middle of the 1970s, with an ABC Wonder Woman TV movie starring Cathy Lee Crosby appearing in 1974. The successor television series, starring Lynda Carter, ran on ABC and then CBS from 1975 to 1979 and coincided with DC making the title monthly.

Initially, the doubling of frequency appears to have harmed sales, coming as it did during the greatest inflationary decade in comics history; it took until 1979 for the title to recover, eventually getting back to where it was in 1971 (but now selling twice as many copies annually). As with Batman, Archie, The Incredible Hulk, and other series that had seen boosts due to television shows, however, sales trailed off following small-screen cancellation. By the final year of the postal data available for the series, 1984, the title was down to 52,145 copies a month.

The mid-1980s, however, were a growth period for comics in the burgeoning Direct Market, and DC, coming off Crisis in Infinite Earths, embarked on a wave of relaunches and renumberings. Wonder Woman left shelves at the end of 1985, returning with a new #1 at the end of 1986. Early sales were strong, according to postal data for Wonder Woman Vol. 2; the sucessor series ran for nearly two decades.

After a third renumbering in 2006, the title briefly returned to its original legacy numbering, fusing the three titles — before ending again in the DC "New 52" relaunch of 2011. A fifth relaunch came as part of DC Rebirth in 2016. Some direct-market only information for those later titles is available in the monthly reports.

—John Jackson Miller

Statement history
Wonder Woman had run Statements of Ownership, Management, and Circulation for years before the postal rules changed in 1960, requiring DC to publish its average circulation numbers. Another raft of rules changes in 1963 appears to have confused several publishers, including DC which ran forms without data in 1963 and 1964 for many titles, before returning to compliance in 1965. DC stopped offering subscriptions in 1969 and 1970, but continued filing the forms for the subscribers it still had. Because DC started the 1986 series on a new postal license (in part because there was a one-year gap), no report exists showing what DC would have sold of its 1985 issues of this series.

Understanding Statements of Ownership
The figures above are taken directly from the annual Statements of Ownership, Management, and Circulation filed by publishers with the United States Postal Service. The sales figure is the Average Paid Circulation figure and includes all copies sold through newsstands, comics shops, and postal subscription. It does not count copies the publisher gave away for free, or copies that were kept for office use.

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