Crazy Jane

29 years ago - Kay Challis is born.

24 years ago - 5-year-old Kay Challis is abused by her father. She retreats internally, developing dissociative identity disorder as a coping mechanism agaisnt the abuse.

15 years ago - 14-year-old Kay Challis is kidnapped by an apocalypse cult to be their sacrifice to reopen the Hellfonts once forged by the Nazis. They are thwarted by the forging of the Fourth Shadowpact. Kay's already fractured identity is further shattered as her body becomes a nexus of chaos energy, giving each seperate alter it's own powers. She is placed in a psychiatric hospital where her alter Jane Morris becomes her dominant identity.

10 years ago - 19-year-old Jane Morris meets Cliff Steele during his time in a psychiatric hospital. He brings her to Niles Caulder, who agrees to help her begin understranding her alternate personalities. She starts helping the Doom Patrol. Instead of a superhero name, she goes by Crazy Jane, a name from several Yeats poems and the painting by Richard Dadd.

7 years ago - 22-year-old Jane Morris allows Cliff Steele to travel inside her psyche with the help of Rebis. He discovers the core of her fractured indentities, and helps her alters work together. She is able to start living a normal life.

2 years ago - 27-years-ago Jane Morris is brought by Cliff Steele to Danny the World before the path to return is closed, finding a kindred spirit where she can be free to allow all her alters to coexit in harmony.

We were actually not planning to use Jane for a long time. She's an integral part of Morrison's Doom Patrol and has gone on to be one of the main characters in many subsequent versions of the team, but she's also one of the best examples of the sort of meta-worldbuilding Morrison used in their take on the Doom Patrol. Jane wasn't a superhero in the strictest sense of the word, and even though she was clearly a part of the Patrol, her time there wasn't really about superheroics.

Eventually, however... we kept finding this small, Jane-shaped opening in the history of the Doom Patrol and its members. For us to do the history of this team correctly we needed her, and that meant we had to find a way to make her make sense. She's still not a superhero, exactly, but she's a beloved part of this incredibly important team.

Crazy Jane's Comic History

Jane's first appearance was in Doom Patrol # 19 in 1989, the first issue of Grant Morrison's celebrated run on the series. This took place right after the Invasion! crossover event, in which the existing Doom Patrol lineup was pretty well decimated, giving Morrison the chance to almost completely reimagine the series. They started by rebuilding a new version of the original threesome of characters from the original Doom Patrol. Robotman carried over, and a new version of Negative Man was invented in the new character Rebis. The third character, however, was completely original.

Filling the same role that Elastigirl once filled on the original team, Crazy Jane brought the same degree of swiss-army-knife powers, but with a much more metatextual story, fitting with the strange world Morrison was forging for their new team. Her experience with her dissociative identity disorder would be surprisingly well-researched and depicted even today, but in the 80s it was unbelievably respectful in its understanding of her experience.

As the story went on, we slowly came to understand the abuse that led to her condition, and as Morrison's story concluded, they ended by giving her a true magical happy ever after, letting her return to Danny the World and live a life that allows her to embrace the parts of her that make her strange. Later takes on the Doom Patrol have continued to feature her, but I honestly don't know if you could ever find a better way to resolve someone's story.

Our Crazy Jane Story

At first, we were just going to include Jane as a part of the Doom Patrol's supporting cast, as someone who had trouble controlling her powers that they were working to help; sort of the same role that Dorothy Spinner played in the comic. Still, to do that, we had to find a way to make her powers work in a way we all collectively accepted. It's understood that her dissociative identity disorder predated her powers; in the comic, it was the Dominator's Gene Bomb from the Invasion! the storyline that empowered her... but if that was the case, what would be going on with her body that would allow it to manifest so many different powers, even if each was associated with a different identity?

The answer, we decided, was magic. By making her a magical sacrifice saved by the fourth Shadowpact, her body can be a nexus of chaos magic, which effectively explains her powers. Of course, once that was done and she had an origin that we believed fit with our take on the world, it was suddenly much easier to accept that she actually spent a time as an active member of the Doom Patrol for a time.

We don't keep her there, of course. Her whole story is about her overcoming her childhood trauma with time and effort and the love of her friends, and about allowing her to accept her own strangeness rather than suppress it. There's a reason Morrison's final issue is entirely about closing her story, and We wanted to give her that same wonderful happy ending.

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