Wonder Woman: Wraparound Covers

Trial of the Amazons + 80th Anniversary ✨

I’m way behind on sharing these here, but I recently (er, as in, within the past year, lol) had the opportunity to do not 1, but 2 wraparound Wonder Woman variant covers for a couple of really cool milestones—her 80th anniversary, as well as the Trial of the Amazons event. I never publicly posted the sketches/thumbnails for either of these variants, so I wanted to share some of that process with you guys now!

For the Trial of the Amazons cover, I sent in these 2 roughs just to quickly communicate a couple of composition options:

I knew that regardless of which one DC went with, I’d be drawing each of the characters separately so the individual pinup drawings could be used for promotional materials. So even though the final art would have its own lighting and effects, I drew each of the characters completely removed from the main image first:

Final art with full trade dress

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The other wraparound variant cover I did was for Wonder Woman’s 80th Anniversary event—the theme for this one was “Wonder Woman through the ages”, showing her spinning around in a handful of costumes she’s had throughout the years. (As you can see, I really tried to channel Sailor Moon here)

The original sketch I sent in was much further along than the standard thumbnails I usually share for initial approval because the editorial team and I had talked through what the concept should be and I was given the green light to proceed to a tighter sketch just off of that discussion. I was given full freedom with which designs to include, so I of course tried to sneak my own Immortal Wonder Woman design in there—

The powers that be at DC pointed out that she only appeared in a 2 issue mini though, so they weren’t quite willing to humor me on that one 😂 No regrets for trying on my part! I ended up replacing her with Cliff Chiang’s Wonder Woman design (one of my favs!):

And here’s the final with trade dress. As you can see, a lot of stuff changed in the final rendering and I have to admit I’m overall happier with the sketch (which is probably why I’ve never actually shared it before publicly, haha…) but sometimes that’s how it goes. These covers always get done on fairly tight deadlines with budgetary constraints that don’t allow for a lot of endless noodling, so all I can do is try my best on each one and apply any lessons learned to the next one!