A Blank Slate

Batman has been featured in comic books since his creation in 1939. As a consequence, an 80 year old hero has a large number of similarly aged villains. Most of the villains I've already posted about here were created between 1939 and 1971. A theme to these blog posts have been the evolution of these old characters into less campy, scarier, more realistically terrifying villains. However, more recently created characters come already fully realized as completely evolved nightmares. In 2007 Grant Morrison introduced Professor Pyg. Before that, Dan Slott and Ryan Sook created Jane Doe.

In 2003, Slott and Sook wrote the miniseries Arkham Asylum: Living Hell. They introduce several new characters, some more interesting than others, but Jane Doe is one of only a few that would continue to appear in other DC mediums. Jane Doe is also one of a few female villains who aren't sidekicks.

Jane Doe's true name is unknown. In fact, other than being distinctly female, she has no defining characteristics. She is described as a cipher, meaning a nobody. In order to fill herself with meaning, she kills a person and assumes the looks, mannerisms and identity of that person, complete with wearing their skin as a suit. Jane Doe, then, could become anyone, from anywhere. This seems to be a combination of a cluster C dependent disorder, and a dissociative identity disorder.

There have been other characters in comics with similar shapeshifting, multiple identity themes, like Spiderman's Chameleon, X-Men's Mystique, or anyone with Mission Impossible mask technology. Jane Doe, however, is not a professional assassin, or international spy, she is more like a shapeshifting monster reminiscent of a Navajo skinwalker, Icelandic selkie, or Celtic changeling. Those influences are created from ancient fears, and I think that is what makes Jane Doe so terrifying. As people, our identities are all we have, they are literally all that defines us, and this character steals them.