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.
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.
Kay Challis was molested by her father, beginning when she was five years old. The first time her father molested her, she was putting a jigsaw puzzle together; this would be an important symbol in her future.
Kay eventually withdraws completely and is replaced by an alternate personality answering by the name "Miranda."
One Easter Sunday, Miranda is the victim of an attempted rape in a church, triggering flashbacks to her former abuse, the destruction of the "Miranda" personality and the completion of the massive personality fragmentation.
Kay is committed to a mental institution soon after.
When the gene-bomb goes off, Jane and all of her personalities are affected; each personality gains a different power (e.g. Black Annis has retractable claws, Flit can teleport, etc.).
Cliff Steele is staying in the same institution as Jane when Will Magnus asks Cliff to look after her, which leads to Jane's becoming a member of Doom Patrol.
Near the end of the Grant Morrison run of Doom Patrol, Jane makes a pilgrimage back to her childhood home, facing her own traumas and overcoming them. This brings peace to her inner turmoil, and her personalities integrate into facets of a more normal, if complex, single personality.
Unfortunately, upon returning to Doom Patrol, Jane is attacked by The Candlemaker and thrown into another dimension, similar to the real world, where she is interned as a schizophrenic and treated by shock therapy.
Cliff eventually rescues Jane from the other dimension and lives with her on Danny the World, formerly Danny the Street.
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Shade, the Changing Man is a fictional comic book character created by Steve Ditko for DC Comics in 1977.
The character was later adapted by Peter Milligan and became one of the first Vertigo titles.
Shade, the Changing Man told the story of a fugitive from the militant planet Meta in another dimension.
Shade (whose full name is Rac Shade) was powered by a stolen "M-vest" (or Miraco-Vest, named for its inventor) which protected him with a force field and enabled him to project the illusion of becoming a large grotesque version of himself.
The character was the first Ditko had created, or helped to create, for a mainstream publisher for many years.
Prior to rejoining DC Comics, Ditko had worked on characters such as his Mr. A. title.
Shade was very much a return to mainstream superheroics, although Shade indicated no particular connection with the DC Universe (although the letters columns stated that there is no reason it could not be shown to be there).
In July 1990, just six months after Shade's final appearance in Suicide Squad, the title and character were revived and revamped by Peter Milligan and Chris Bachalo.
This new series used some of the same names and concepts from the original, but these were few and far between; Rac Shade was now a lovelorn poet sent to Earth to stop a growing tide of madness from consuming the planet, while his M-Vest was now a Madness-Vest that he could use to warp reality.
The comic still took place in the DC universe - John Constantine turned up for a three-issue story arc, Death of The Endless appeared in a subtle cameo in issue 50 and Shade appeared with a group of other Vertigo characters in 1999's Totems - and the original series was rationalized as being a story that Shade made up to amuse himself while traveling to Earth.
