Every week, we will be examining comic book stories, plots and ideas that were abandoned by a later writer while still acknowledging that the abandoned story DID still happen. Click here for an archive of all the previous editions of Abandoned Love. Feel free to e-mail me at bcronin@comicbookresources.com if you have any suggestions for future editions of this feature.

This week, we take a look at how Robert Kanigher brought the era of Mod Wonder Woman to an end! It is one of the rougher ends to an era that you'll see.

After a bit of a preview in Wonder Woman #178 of the new era of Wonder Woman, Mike Sekowsky and Denny O'Neil fully committed to the idea in #179.

The issue had three major parts to it...

1. The Amazons, Wonder Woman's mother, all of her fancy weapons and finally, perhaps most importantly, her powers are all taken away from Wonder Woman...

2. Wonder Woman meets I Ching, who will be her traveling companion, father figure and, perhaps most importantly, her teacher in the ways of karate...

3. Steve Trevor is taken out of the picture via a bullet...

Steve recovers the following issue enough to be just totally killed off by the main bad guy, Doctor Cyber...

So that became the set-up. Wonder Woman (now with no boyfriend or any other parts of her past intact) and I Ching traveling the globe and going on cool adventures and missions, with Diana using her training from I Ching to make up for her lost powers and weapons...

Diana would wear different outfits on each mission, just like a normal woman (although she seemed partial to a white jumpsuit).

Well, this approach proved to not be the way DC chose to go, so eventually DC brought the guy that Sekowsky and O'Neil had replaced, Robert Kanigher, to come back and restore order to the title. He did so with all of the finesse of a bull in a china shop.

First off, he introduces an unknown sniper who first kills a stand-in for a previous editor on Wonder Woman, Dorothy Woolfolk, who only edited two issues and not even the ones right before Kanigher returned, making Kanigher's decision to have her killed by proxy to appear REALLY messed up...

Next, after the sniper shoots a few other innocent people, the sniper takes out I Ching...

Wonder Woman goes for revenge and after a short battle...

She loses her memory (I love how the sniper dies once his part in the plot is finished with. No motive or anything, just a tool in Kanigher's reboot). She finds herself drawn to Paradise Island and makes her way there in a stolen jet. She crashes in the waters outside the island. Luckily, the Amazons have returned...

Wonder Woman's mother finds her and restores her memory, omitting the whole mod affair (along with I Ching) from her mind, though, so Wonder Woman is now officially rebooted to her "classic" self.

That's certainly ONE way of returning things to the status quo!

Thanks to Graeme Burk for suggesting this one (it was always going to be one I was going to address, but I can still give a guy some credit!). If YOU have a suggestion for an instance where a comic book writer dropped the plotline of the previous writer, drop me a line at bcronin@comicbookresources.com