The outfit, which includes a shiny red blouse, blue blazer and spandex tights, looks more like club wear made by American Apparel than superhero gear.
As a result, longtime fans like Katie Wooley are super angry.
DC Comics / AP
This illustration released by DC Comics shows the new look for Wonder Woman designed by DC Comics co-publisher Jim Lee.
Wooley, a lifelong Wonder Woman fan, believes changing the iconic outfit is an example of people making changes that don't need to be made.
"Some things are better off staying the same and this is one of them!" she said. "Leave Wonder Woman's outfit alone. It's patriotic, besides that's where/how her history began helping our country ... This news is so disappointing!"
Wonder Woman's publisher, DC Comics, said the change is coming in conjunction with the character's 600th issue and is part of a reboot to give sales a boost. Although the Amazon princess is the most famous superheroine, the comic isn't a big seller.
According to the New York Times, the new costume ties into an alternative history that is being produced by "Babylon 5" creator J. Michael Straczynski, the new writer of the series, in order to make the Wonder Woman comic as financially lucrative as the merchandising.
The reimagining of Wonder Woman's origin has her not growing up on Paradise Island with her mom, Queen Hippolyta, but being smuggled out as a baby to save her from being killed by unknown forces.
But Straczynski said "the wardrobe issue" was something he wanted to address as soon as he took the job.
"She's been locked into pretty much the exact same outfit since her debut in 1941," Straczynski told the Times and added, "What woman only wears only one outfit for 60-plus years?"
Wooley disagrees with Straczynski and suggests there's a double standard going on.
"There's nothing wrong with the old outfit," she said. "They never changed Superman's outfit. They tried to change Spider-Man's outfit and that didn't work. They say they're changing the outfit to relate to younger people, but why change history? It just diminishes the character."
Amanda Collins, a Phoenix-based copywriter who has more than 70 Wonder Woman action figures and a custom-made Wonder Woman costume, is OK with the new look, but not other aspects of the reboot.
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Professional Wonder Woman impersonator Jennifer Wenger.
"The costume is not the issue," Collins said. "Sometimes on the old Lynda Carter series, Wonder Woman would wear a cape, an underwater outfit or a motorcycle uniform.
"But they are changing her history! If she's just orphaned, how does she get her superpowers? It doesn't make sense."
Like Wooley, Collins doesn't appreciate how DC Comics is taking liberties with Wonder Woman -- things they wouldn't do with their other prime properties.
"If they took Superman and said, 'Screw Krypton!' and put him in Iowa as the orphaned child of a crack whore mom, people would be up in arms."
But to comic book historians, like David Merrill, who runs Stupid Comics, a website that reprints panels from old comic books and makes snarky comments about them, the costume change isn't significant, because the character hasn't been interesting since the early 1940s when its creator, psychologist William Moulton Marston, was writing it.
Marston, who lived simultaneously with two women -- his wife and a former student -- was a believer in the healing power of submission and worked in scenes where Wonder Woman would be tied up with her golden lasso.
"I like the 1940s Wonder Woman comics when [Marston] was writing it and working in all his theories about submission, and the art had a weird folk-art vibe," Merrill said. "But, to my knowledge, they really haven't done anything interesting with the character since then."
Mark Evanier, who writes about comics and TV, concurs, and suspects any change is only temporary.
"The comic book industry has an unfortunate tendency to use stunts like this to generate excitement," he said. "They're taking a character with an iconic costume just to do something for publicity, but it always reverts back to the original."
Evanier would prefer any reboot of the character concentrate on content more than costumes.
"She's very popular and has a great name and a great look, but in the history of the comic, there have only been 25 good stories. As a comic, 'Wonder Woman' has never been that wonderful," Evanier said.
But that doesn't mean she can't be reinvented like Batman or Iron Man -- the creators might have to work out some kinks or embrace them. For instance, some readers, such as Evanier, see a lesbian subtext in the series.
"There IS a lesbian subtext that can't be denied," he said. "The women live on an island where they will die if a man arrives. How is that not a lesbian fantasy?
DC Comics
Image of previous Wonder Woman in DC Comics.
"However, Wonder Woman is littered with half-assed subtexts that don't relate to a story."
Meanwhile, animation historian Jerry Beck points out that Wonder Woman's outfit has been changed before -- but always goes back to the original.
"In the 1960s, she went mod and wore a white outfit that looked like Emma Peel from 'The Avengers,'" he said, adding that in the 1970s, before the Carter series, a TV movie featured Cathy Lee Crosby -- a blonde -- wearing an outfit that is similar in concept to the new outfit.
"But the new costume doesn't make her look like a superhero, it makes her look like she's going to the office," Beck said.
Beck suspects that the new outfit is contingent to a new movie, and says something similar happened to Batman's costume a year before the Adam West TV series debuted in the mid-1960s.
"To me, there's something more corporate than creative about this change," he said.
Surprisingly, the new outfit gets the biggest approval from a person who depends on the old costume for her livelihood.
Jennifer Wenger makes her living as a professional Wonder Woman impersonator on Hollywood Boulevard, and she supports the concept.
"I applaud DC Comics for the way they're marketing this," she said. "They announced this five, six months ago, but now with Comic-Con coming up, it's going to be the big story."
Wenger has no plans to adopt the new outfit ("When Wonder Woman wore a pantsuit a few years ago, nobody wore that at the conventions," she said), but admits that some fans are purists and criticize the adaptations she's made to her own classic outfit.
"I wear bootie shorts instead of diaper pants because it makes my legs look longer," she said. "People get upset, but I tell them, 'This is me. This is my version.'"
