
The sales figures for April 2011 have been posted at ICv2, and things aren’t looking too bad, really. Wonder Woman #610 was in 50th place with 31,002 copies sold, a decline of 1.3%. A drop is never fun, but it’s fairly normal for a regular series going along without any major shakeups, creatively or storywise. I’d call this a good month. Here are the numbers for the issue, and the five issues previous:

NOTE: The average sales total is based on all of the available sales data, which currently comprises every issue of the series since September 1996, for 168 issues in total. The average rank is not given because rank is dependent on what other books came out that month, and that’s such a variable that an average really wouldn’t mean anything.
Wonder Woman is all over the place lately. The five percent drops were pretty substantial, but then it calmed down nicely into a level we could easily call standard attrition for two issues before dropping over three percentage points. Now it’s back in the standard attrition range, so either the 3.4% was just a weird issue and the sales are starting to level out some or it’s a bizarrely selling series that could easily drop 3-5 percentage points next month. The numbers are too inconsistent to say for sure, and the next few months might not even help much. With the “Odyssey” storyline wrapping up in its seventeen-part finale (three-part, actually… I exaggerate to suggest it may be a teensy bit bloated), regular customers might stick it out and see what comes next. Or they might get annoyed with the stretched out conclusion and ditch it. Or they might decide that Flashpoint: Wonder Woman and the Furies looks like way more fun than the regular series and go buy that instead. A lot of things could happen.
Past and future aside, April was a good month for Wonder Woman. There were a lot of new books out (#1s tend to sell a lot), plus special issues for popular Marvel series (those introductory, .1 things), and the book only dropped one place on the sales chart. In terms of issues sold, a 1.3% drop is nothing to be concerned about. As we’ve discussed before, stable comic book series tend to drift slowly down in sales, shedding a few readers each month until some new event or creative team bumps the sales back up. A 1.3% drop is very much in the realm of standard attrition, which is a nice spot to be in (if it holds up) for a book that had been dropping at a fast rate.
Compared to the historical average, Wonder Woman is still far off the mark and I don’t see it getting near the average again until September, if a new creative team takes over. DC seems to be planning something big for September, and hopefully Wonder Woman will be involved. But yeah, the historical average will be out of reach for the next few months anyway.
Prediction for Next Month: Last month, I predicted that Wonder Woman #610 would sell 30,750 copies and it actually sold 31,002, so I was off by 252 copies. That’s not terrible, but it’s not that good either. Hopefully I’m more on track with these next predictions. It looks like Wonder Woman #611 has been bumped back to June 1st, and will double ship with Wonder Woman #612, so they’ll be no sales post for May AND I now have to double predict for June. Seeing as we just had a double shipping month in March, I will look there for inspiration. But I’m also going to buy into this standard attrition idea too. For Wonder Woman #611, I predict a drop of roughly 1.5% for sales of 30,540. I then predict a bigger drop (a la March) for Wonder Woman #612, down about 2.5% for sales of 29,780. Check back in two months to see how I did!!
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