Should DC kill off Diana in an epic manner and pass the Wonder Woman mantle..

[theoneandonly]

the way things are currently handled it would be a grating storyline like Donna whispering to her that darkseid was right or something which would lead to her "fall" from grace leading to a who will don the tiara or who wields the lasso series which will have Cassie and Artemis fight Donna for the right to the mantle resulting in Donna's death and Artemis gaining the mantle.

[Frank]

iirc, wasn't Heinberg's run originally going to end with Donna keeping the role of Wonder Woman, and the backlash led DC to asking that he re-write the ending, which, because of his conflicts with writing Grey's Anatomy, led to those heinous delays? I think the only other time we've come that close to Diana really being replaced was post-COIE, in Dan Mishkin's rejected proposal for the new title in which Diana was going to pass on the mantle because, in a paraphrase from memory, "Diana as a character had learned all she had to learn."

I think that, while one can replace one of the big three for awhile, the legacy character will never permanently hold the role and will always go the way of Azrael or Steel. And few other legacy characters of properties that have previously had traction that actually lasted. Sure, Kyle Rayner was the Green Lantern for over a decade, but Hal came back. Connor replaced Green Arrow & Wally replaced Barry, but you can't keep a good blond down, apparently. I realize that before Hal there was Alan and before Barry there was Jay, but both Hal and Barry had their own titles for twice as long, if not longer, than Alan & Jay. While people growing up in the 40s might think of Alan & Jay as the Green Lantern and the Flash, people from the mid-50s to the mid-80s see Hal & Barry in those roles.

Even from the "B" stable, the original often returns; 1/2-dozen of characters who have held the mantle of Dr. Fate, but Kent Nelson always comes back.

When Byrne killed Diana, it was pretty clear that she wasn't going to be gone permanently because we got all of those dreadfully slow panels of talking diety heads with no backgrounds as Diana experienced being a goddess. She was never really absent from the book.

She can lose the contest to a red head, she can renounce Man's World because of its horrors, she can die in a fantastically underwhelming way at the hand of Neron, but, for the foreseeable future, the real Wonder Woman is going to be Diana.