The Mysterious Case Of Jane Doe

[foxhack.insanejournal.com]

xdoop posted some scans from Batman: Streets of Gotham's Manhunter stories a few hours ago. They featured Jane Doe, who was... quite different from the last time I'd seen her in comics. The first time I'd seen her was in Arkham Asylum: Living Hell, where she was one of the three or four parallel stories featured in the six issue miniseries. This post contains a summary and several spoilers for the book.

All books were written by Dan Slott, illustrated by Ryan Sook, and colored by Lee Loughridge. The artwork has a very Hellboy, Mike Mignola vibe to it which works well in this context.

Arkham Asylum: Living Hell #1: Jane Doe killed and impersonated Doctor Anne Carver. She then tricked Warren White (a large-scale con artist who by the end of this series becomes Great White Shark) into giving her money so she could transfer him out of Arkham. And well, she seduces him, but Batman intervened. A scuffle happens, White discovers Dr. Carver's head stuffed in a mask ornament, and... well, this happens. (Two and a half pages out of twenty-three.)








In issue #2, one of the guards (who had a thing for Dr. Carver) confronts her and asks her what she did with her body.





In issue #3, she speaks to a not-quite-very-honest guard...



She impersonates him afterwards, and starts a breakout by leaving some cells open.

In issue #4, she sets more inmates free, and kidnaps Warren White. (No scans, she was barely in the issue.)

And in issue #5... she explains her plan to Warren.





(The skin she was working on had no scars, but since White got beat up so often, she had to make some adjustments to it...)



Issue #6 only features her trying to escape from the ghosts of people she's killed, and after the demonic event that cause them to happen is over, she almost gets out, but Batman stops her at the door.

So what have we learned here? Whoever this is, it's not the same Jane Doe from this miniseries, unless some weird retcon happened while we weren't looking... The Jane Doe featured here has some very good crafting skills, can create fake skins with facial features and fake hair with materials (I'm guessing she made the Fish skin while she was still impersonating Dr. Carver) but nowhere is it mentioned that she's a metahuman. Nowhere is it mentioned that she doesn't have any skin, or that her skins have "expiration dates" (but I wouldn't have a problem buying the idea that they wear out, because the fake skin that Jane is wearing in these scans ripped easily when other people tugged on it). Unless someone did this to make Jane Doe different from that guy featured a while back... the one that superglued his face to a mask and his father ripped it from his face, taking the face itself with it No-Face. (Thanks, suzene!)

Comments

[xlineartx.insanejournal.com]

She'd have to do some kind of cast to get the shape exactly right, at the very least. Is she telekinetic? Because it'd be hard to manipulate that realistically without intense animatronics or something.