The Creeper

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​​33 years ago - Jack Ryder is born in France.
​14 years ago - 19-year-old Jack goes to school for journalism.
​12 years ago - 21-year-old Jack leaves school to begin working on a sensationalist journalism program.
​10 years ago - 23-year-old Jack becomes the host of his own show, starting a rivalry with his producer, Vera Sweet.
​9 years ago - 24-year-old Jack & Vera Sweet stake out a drug deal for his show, and witness​ Oswald Cobblepot's men selling smuggled joker venom to Felix Faust.  When the are caught she is killed, and Faust magically fuses him with the Venom before he is tossed into Gotham Harbor, where he manifests a unique magical identity, the Creeper, who torments his attackers to near-insanity.  Ryder dedicates himself to getting rid of his alter ego.
​6 years ago - 27-year-old Jack is confronted by the Demon Grockk, revealing that the Creeper is an escaped lesser minion that has parasitically bonded to him.
​5 years ago - 28-year-old Jack​ ventures into hell with Etrigan the Demon to return the Creeper but discovers that it is not a demon at all, but an unknown manifestation of chaos magic.
​3 years ago - 30-year-old Jack​ takes out a million dollar bounty on the Creeper.
The Creeper is one of those characters that is damn near impossible to explain to someone.  His origins have been redone a half-dozen times and his powers barely make sense.  Half the point of the character is that he DOESN'T make sense, that there's an aura of inscrutable madness in his basic concept. That's part of what makes him such a fan favorite, but it makes him very hard to pin down when trying to craft a timeline.

Trying to distill his various backstories down to a single origin is tricky, but we've arrived at a simplified version of a few of the more popular ones.  While tracking smugglers moving stolen joker venom for his show, he was found out and bonded to the venom by Felix Faust before being thrown into the Harbor and presumed dead.  Being bonded to the drug affected him an unknown way to manifest a new, superpowered but insane identity with it's own will and ego, acting without Ryder's consent and making his life a living hell.  

We've tapped into some of the modern stories about the Creeper that suggest that he is actually some sort of external, demonic possessing entity, but actually wanted to flip that idea on it's end, suggesting it as an answer for Jack before he discovers that it's all fake, the Creeper is not a Demon, and they STILL don't know what he is.   The fun of the character it to watch Jack slowly lose his mind in a battle of wills against an insane superhero identity,.