This feature is called "I Tell You What If," and it is about all the times that an alternate reality storyline ended up becoming part of official continuity. Very often, if an idea being good enough to be used in an alternate timeline it will often end up being considered good enough to use in the REAL timeline.

Today, we look at how Wonder Woman's battle armor from Kingdom Come made its way into DC Comics' canon.

Generally speaking, as the years went by, Wonder Woman became more and more warrior-like in her depiction in the comics. She was always ostensibly an Amazonian warrior, but that was certainly not how she was actually depicted in the comics. Her main weapon, after all, was a lasso. She was not chopping people up or anything like that.

However, during the 1980s, more and more depictions of Wonder Woman would show her with a sword. Finally, when George Perez officially rebooted the character in 1987 following Crisis on Infinite Earths, he now gave her a warrior's set of weapons (I wrote about this stuff last year when someone asked when Wonder Woman first started using a sword and shield regularly).

Here are all of her new weapons on the cover of Perez's first issue...

And here she is decked out with all of them on a later cover...

Plus, just because it is an awesome cover, here's a Brian Bolland cover showing her with her weapons...

So, it is important to note that by the start of the 1990s, Wonder Woman had already been revamped by George Perez and company so that she was much more of a warrior. She was still a big believer in peace, of course, but she also had a big ax she would cut you with if you messed with her. She was vast. She contained multitudes.

However, in the 1996 miniseries, Kingdom Come, by Alex Ross and Mark Waid, they decided to take the idea of Wonder Woman's warrior nature to a next level. You see, in the future, Wonder Woman has become more and more warrior-like. When Superman returned to the world of superheroes after suffering a great tragedy, he and Wonder Woman grow close to each other, but they had major differences in ideas of what kind of force is needed to deal with problems. Wonder Woman even seemed to be a bit dismissive of what she felt to be Superman's naivette.

It came to a head when the prison that Superman and Wonder Woman's forces were using to contain both supervillains and so-called "anti-heroes" alike ended up suffering a riot.

Wonder Woman is prepared to put the riot down HARD, and to do so, she breaks out her special suit of battle armor....

As you can see, the two disagreed on how to handle things. In the end, though, Wonder Woman ultimately comes around to Superman's way of thinking (after Superman himself lost his way for a moment and was about to kill a bunch of world leaders because they didn't trust the superheroes and so just dropped a nuclear bomb on the Gulag). This is signified by her removing her armor to show that she's changed.

However, a design that good could not be kept in just an alternate future like Kingdom Come!

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In 1999, Eric Luke, Yanick Paquette and Bob McLeod introduced the new Children of Cronus. Cronus created these new beings, with one of them, Devastation, built out of clay like Wonder Woman, to destroy the Amazons.

After their initial battle in Wonder Woman #143, Wonder Woman was injured and needed to protect her self from Devastation (who looked like a little girl but was just as powerful as Wonder Woman), so she went and got the battle armor in the next issue...

Adam Hughes did a GORGEOUS cover for the issue, by the way...

Thanks to reader Steven W. for reminding me that this was the first time donned the Kingdom Come battle armor!

In 2001, DC had a crossover event called Our Worlds at War. It paid off a subplot introduced early in Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness' run on Superman where Superman was enlisted by Mongul to take on Imperiex, a powerful villain that turned out to be just a probe of the REAL Imperiex, who wanted to basically destroy the universe because he felt that it was flawed.

So two years later, Imperiex's forces finally reached Earth. The Justice League tried to take them on in JLA: Our Worlds at War #1 (by Loeb and Ron Garney) and things did not go well.

Since things are really dire, Wonder Woman is now once more decked out in her Kingdom Come battle armor...

Sadly, during a battle with one of the Imperiex probes, Wonder Woman is badly injured...

Superman brings her to her mother, Hippolyta...

Hippolyta would end up taking over the armor and then actually sacrificing herself later in the storyline (don't worry, she got better later on).

The battle armor was a regular fixture for the rest of that Wonder Woman series, right up until the New 52, when it seems like they've gone in different directions with regards to her armor.

Okay, so that's it for this installment! Feel free to send me ideas for future installments by dropping me a line at brianc@cbr.com!