Crazy Jane

Crazy Jane
Publication information
Publisher	DC Comics
First appearance	Doom Patrol (2nd series) #19 (February 1989)
Created by	Grant Morrison (writer) Richard Case (artist)
In-story information
Alter ego	Kay Challis
Team affiliations	Doom Patrol
Notable aliases	Various, see Personalities
Abilities	Various

Crazy Jane is a fictional character created by Grant Morrison and Richard Case for their work on the Vertigo Comics version of the Doom Patrol. She first appears in Doom Patrol (2nd series) #19 (February 1989). According to the afterword in the first trade paperback collection of Morrison's Doom Patrol, she is based on Truddi Chase. Morrison was reading her autobiography, When Rabbit Howls, while constructing his Doom Patrol series.

An earlier instance of the name, and perhaps its first use in literature, occurs in the Scottish poem "The Ghost of Crazy Jane", published in 1814, by the poet William Nicholson (1782-1849). The name "Crazy Jane" is taken from a Richard Dadd painting, which is also referred to in the Crazy Jane poems of William Butler Yeats. A number of Jane's alters are named after Sylvia Plath poems. Other sources of names are song titles by R.E.M., Incredible String Band, The Jam and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Crazy Jane, or Crazy Janey, is also the name of a charitable organization of the 1900s in Newark, New Jersey, which made clothes and donations for poor women.

Jane Morris is the dominant alternate personality of Kay Challis, who suffers from multiple personality disorder. As a result of exposure to the alien Dominators' "gene bomb", each of her 64 alternate personalities has a different super-power.

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