Community discovery (CD) under complex networks is a hot discussion issue in network science research. Recently, many evolutionary methods have been introduced to detect communities of networks. However, evolutionary optimization-based community discovery still suffers from two problems. First, the initialization population quality of the current evolutionary algorithm is not good, resulting in slow convergence speed, and the final performance needs to be further improved. Another important issue is that current methods of CD have inconsistent network detection performance at different scales, showing a dramatic drop as the network scale increases. To address such issues, this paper proposes an algorithm based on the novel initial method and improved gray wolf optimization (NIGWO) to tackle the above two problems at the same time. In this paper, a novel initialization strategy is proposed to generate a high-quality initial population and greatly accelerate the convergence speed of population evolution. The strategy effectively fused the elite substructure of the community and different features based on the dependency and other features among nodes. Moreover, an improved GWO is presented with two new search strategies. An improved hunting prey stage is proposed to retain the excellent substructures of populations and quickly improve the community structure. Furthermore, new mutation strategies from node level to community level are designed in an improved encircling prey stage. Specifically, boundary nodes are mutated according to a proposed function to improve the search efficiency and save the computation assumption. Numerous experiments have proven our method obtains more excellent performance in most networks compared with 11 state-of-the-art algorithms.