The Creeper
33 years ago - Jack Ryder is born in Paris, France.
26 years ago - 7-year-old Jack moves with his family to Gotham City.
14 years ago - 19-year-old Jack attends Gotham University to study 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 way more prolific than you might think at first glance. He shows up in animation all the time, and has been a consistent recurring guest star across the entire spectrum of DC series for decades. I think part of the reason for the broad popularity of the character is the fact that they have a really uncommonly low barrier to entry. You kind of get the character's entire deal just by looking at them, and there really isn't much more you need to know. We know his name is Jack Rider, we know he becomes this wild yellow super-agile cackling lunatic... but beyond that he doesn't really have much lore you need to follow, because they've never settled on a singular origin.
Usually that would be a problem, but I think the Creeper is a very rare case where less is just way, way more.
Usually that would be a problem, but I think the Creeper is a very rare case where less is just way, way more.
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The Creeper Comic HistoryThe debut of the Creeper actually requires us to set the scene a little. Steve Ditko stepped down as the artist of Spider-Man over in Marvel over in 1966 (specifically why he stepped down is a subject of a lot of Nerd debate, it's worth looking into if you're interested). While Spider-Man continued under the pen of John Romita Sr, Steve was very busy for the next few years. He would go work for Wallace Woods over at Tower Comics, working on T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and Dynamo, create his objectivist hero Mr. A in Wood's underground comic witzend, and also create the Question at Charlston. Then, in 1968, Ditko began his brief stint with DC with a character that really only makes sense BECAUSE he's a Ditko character.
The Creeper appeared for the first time in 1968 in Showcase #73. He was Jack Ryder, a TV reporter who got fired because he wasn't kowtowing to sponsors... the sort of righteous crusader that Ditko had already explored with both Mister A and the Question, but this story found a way to link that Ditko archetype with a character clearly designed to take advantage of Ditko's time on Spider-Man. The book was filled with his classic and dynamically physical action. It's actually kind of incredible for them to find a way to build a character that fits in with the types of heroes Ditko seems to want to work on, while also managing to ape his most popular work. |
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The strange thing, though, is the route they took to get there. In his original origin, he was basically investigating the kidnapping of a defecting communist scientist, and used the dregs of a costume rental place to sneak into a costume party. That's it, that's where the costume came from, there was no more thought put into it than that. He finds the scientist after being stabbed in a fight, and the scientist uses his special formula to give him heightened strength and stamina, and enhanced healing. He also used Jack's knife wound to hide his other device, a matter transmuter that he could use to... instantly change in and out of his costume. I'm going to give you a second to reread that sentance.
Maybe the weirdest thing about this original take on the Creeper, however, is just how his whole demeanor works. I think it's fair to say that most people think of the Creeper as being this unhinged, dangerous cackling madman, that he's barely containing the insanity of this alternate personality inside him. This wasn't the case though. Ryder was perfectly sane. He was just affecting his strange movement and cackling demeanor to confuse people. It was an act. The end result is kind of the same, but it's just really odd that most modern takes on the Creeper are based on the personality he was PRETENDING to have. |
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After his appearance in Showcase Ditko did a six issue run of Beware the Creeper, and for years afterward, he was a very prolific crossover character in all sorts of various anthology series and guest appearances. He has so many appearances that I actually struggled to figure out exactly when they abandoned the idea that he was only pretending to be insane, but I BELIEVE it was in the second Creeper series in 1997. His origin is adjusted, so that now he was attacked and drugged during an investigation when the matter transmuting device was implanted in him, so now every time he becomes the Creeper, it recreates the effects of the drugs. It's not exactly an elegant update, but you can see they're trying to work out a way to make his madness actually part of his whole story, but it's kind of an unwieldy origin to adapt.
He was further rebooted again in his 2007 Brave New World series... so now he was injected with a serum with a huge healing factor and then shot in the head, so now becoming the Creeper is part of a resurrection process... and I think even a casual observer can see that this is an origin influenced by Deadpool. The same series later retconned it's own retcon, suggesting that the Creeper is a half-demon. He even spoke in rhyme like Etrigan for a time. There's never really been a downturn in the popularity of the Creeper, he's appeared consistently in comics and in animation for decades, he's just never done so with a fully intact origin story. |
Our Creeper StoryJust like with all Creeper appearances, we don't really have to change much about his active story, we just needed to nail down an origin we all liked. Some of us are actually advocates for his original origin, and the idea that his madness is all an act, but personally that just doesn't feel special enough. Even though the idea that the Creeper is another identity manifesting inside Jack isn't true to his original characterization, I think that at this point if you're looking to do an idealized version of the Creeper, you need to include that.
What we finally agreed on is that maybe part of the APPEAL of the character is the vagueness of his origin. We created a sequence of events that mingles drugs and science and magic, and don't really explain exactly what's going on when he becomes the Creeper. We created a few events trying to build on that idea, like a whole red herring story implying that he's demonic somehow, that eventually is just proven incorrect. It's weird for us to find instances where the best course of action is LESS information, but sometimes that just seems to be the best way to represent the character at hand. We also made one small change... as a nod to the absolutely fantastic Vertigo series Beware the Creeper, which features a completely unique character and is set in Paris in 1925, we made Jack Parisian born. We were tempted to try to adapt the Vertigo series, but the Creeper is really just too iconic a character... Strange origins and all, he's one of those characters that just by existing thoroughly defines the landscape. |
The Creeper by OliverNome (rip)
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