Who's This? The original's ferocious replacement.
The facts: Deborah Domaine is the original Cheetah's niece, all about ecology and being friends with Wonder Woman and everything, until Kobra kidnaps her and turns her into an animalistic killer. It happens late in 1980, in Wonder Woman #274. After her first two-issue story, she joins the Secret Society of Super-Villains and is essentially never a solo threat again in this continuity (unless you count the audiobook
"Cheetah on the Prowl" from Fisher-Price). After the Crisis, the best she can get is a reference to Debbie Domaine, but all Cheetahs are essentially Barbara Minerva, and from time to time, Priscilla Rich.
How you could have heard of her: There is one exception. In 2015, this version of Cheetah showed up in the Sensation Comics digital-first series, a story ostensibly set in pre-Crisis continuity and collections in Sensation Comics Featuring Wonder Woman (print version) #15. Speaking of which...
Example story: Sensation Comics Featuring Wonder #40-41 (June 2015) "Our Little Dance" by Adam Beechen, José Luis Garcia-Lopez and Kevin Nowlan
I mean, José Luis Garcia-Lopez? I'm not made of stone! Though I'm not sure the story makes a good case for needing Debbi Domaine in continuity. Missing the cat ears, she looks a lot like the Minerva Cheetah, and her insanity is closer to the one Priscilla Rich suffered from. From the safety of a non-canon series, the creative team has 'ported traits from every version into a single character. But she IS called Debbi Domaine, and Who's Who instructs us that she was last left at Arkham. In this story, she's at a different prison psychiatric hospital and her family is asking for her to be transferred to a lower security facility and the case is made that she's sick. Wonder Woman also mentions Debbi's fixation with the environment. So I think there's ENOUGH of Debbi in there to cover this story. And did I mention the JLGL art? I did? Well, it's an extra reason, isn't it?
So our story begins with Diana in court testifying to how dangerous the Cheetah was a year before when she had escaped to wreak revenge on her, taking an aeronautics museum apart, hurting a lot of people (D.A. is big on reminding us that meta-human battles have a high casualty rate, seeing as his sister died when Hawkman ballsed up catching the Scarecrow), but eventually meeting a submissive end.
The judge, well known for downgrading metahuman security condition, agrees to have Debbi transferred. Diana sticks around to see it happen, and good thing too. The Cheetah's long nails double as a pretty efficient screwdriver!
Pretty soon, her guards are screaming their heads off in the armored truck, and Wonder Woman has to jump into action to prevent the Cheetah from killing her "host"'s aunt.
Priscilla Rich was a planner. Archaeologist Barbara Minerva is also a pretty deep villain. The thing about Debbi Domaine is that she's a savage fury. Bless her, Diana tries to talk her down, tries to bring Debbi back to the surface, but the fight ends much the same way the one in the museum did.
Brutally. Is this an indictment of the second Cheetah's usefulness as a Wonder Woman foe? It's always going to be a knuckle duster and nothing more, whereas other versions of the character can have more varied schemes so are better to keep around? Perhaps if they'd let her head clear a little bit and leaned into the eco-warrior aspect, but by the early 90s, Batman the Animated Series had sort of given that role to Poison Ivy and (most importantly) Catwoman. Cheetah would have seemed a copycat even if she was first on the picket line. So sorry, Debbi. You didn't make the Crisis Cut.
Who's Next? One of the Legion's first LGBTQ+ members.
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