Despite what one might might assume when encountering literally anyone even remotely associated with superpowers and tights, Duncan's tale is... rather mundane. Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia with a Fisherman for a father and a mother who ran a local diner, the boy in question up grew extraordinarily normally; playing videogames, staying at his grandparents' when his mom was busy at the shop and his dad was out at sea and helping his granddad out in the garage fixing cars and the occasional boat.

And then one day when he was fifteen, he got hit by a truck.

After about a good ten seconds of screaming and another thirty spent wondering why he wasn't dead, he extricated himself from the big-rig's engine-block that had wrapped around both him and the streetlight he'd been leaning against only to find that not only was he not dead, he was perfectly intact. All things considered, that's some pretty heavy shit to lay on a fifteen year old. So it's not all that surprising that when the (very) drunk trucker half staggered, half fell out of his truck at the sight of him, and sirens began echoing in the distance, the kid ran the hell out of there. A few days of trial, error and a lot of Wikipedia later, and the boy had a pretty good idea what all that was about: He was a Metahuman, a one-in-a-million carrier of a superhuman gene that may or may not activate under extreme stress (Like, for instance, getting hit by a truck while waiting for the bus). Frankly, it sounded a lot like a bunch of pseudo-science crap you'd find in an old comic book, but lacking any other explanation for his sudden... talents... it was one he'd have to accept.

Now, usually, when someone finds out they've got crazy superpowers, things usually go in one of two predictable ways; one, they become a spandex-clad boy-scout that dedicates every moment of every day to having the brightest smile, rescuing cats from trees and giving lectures about the dangers of "The Reefer" and sex before marriage or two; going full ham, burning orphanages, kicking puppies and generally being real goddamn edgy just for the sake of it. Duncan to his credit, chose the rarely considered, often forgotten third option-

"Yeah... No. Fuck that."

And so, despite the call to adventure literally screaming directly into his ears, Duncan carried on his life as normal; Growing up as normally as he possibly could- getting average grades, shoveling his grandparents' driveway in the wintertime, trying and failing several times at that whole romance thing and working through his apprenticeship as a diesel mechanic at the local shipyard after highschool.

Unfortunately for him, as the old trope goes, 'The Call Knows Where you Live'.

And one day while Duncan was just wrapping up his night-shift shortly after his twenty-first birthday, Metallo came bursting out of one of the shipping containers in the yard, raiding a docked cargo ship for... something and then going on a rampage with speed and ferocity never shown on the news before. Despite having reservations about the whole 'Hero' thing, the one guy in town with the ability to intervene couldn't exactly sit idly by while a super-powered terminator powered by glowing space-rocks butchered his coworkers and leveled his town. So, throwing on a respirator to hide his face, the young man nutted up and went after the deranged cyborg... or, more accurately, spent the next hour on the receiving of a brutal beatdown at the hands of someone that was at least as strong, as fast and much, much more experienced than he was at the time that was also incapable of feeling pain or fatigue, all to buy time for people to get away and call for someone who actually knew what the hell they were doing.

But that help never came.

And although being beaten within an inch of his life in the most literal sense imaginable... the Rookie Hero endured. Rising to his feet over and over again in the face of blows that could sunder mountains until, finally he managed to somehow knock Metallo down hard enough that he didn't get back up.

He'd actually managed to save the day.

Unfortunately... he actually managed to save the day. And as anyone from Fawcett, Gotham or Metropolis could tell you, the minute a local hero does that, things rapidly go sideways in the worst possible way as every lowlife with a superpower takes it as a queue to come out of the woodwork; Within two weeks, a major drug cartel decided to use the disarray caused by the Metallo incident to try and force it's way into the largest Canadian port on the Atlantic, bringing with them the drug-fueled villain Snowflame and his new partner in crime Crackrock (equally named for her guitar-powered sonic attacks as well as... well... all the crack) to keep Halifax's mysterious new hero busy through their operations.

A month after the denim-clad hero without a name and the Halifax Regional Police discreetly (and awkwardly at first) worked together to shut that whole enterprise down, Duncan, still sore from his narrow victory at the hands of Metallo and the gongshow of dealing with the Cartel and their enforcers was more than a little unhappy when he found out his girlfriend at the time (the existence of which was an extreme rarity in itself; the boy'd never really learned how to do romance, what with knowing that a meaningful hug from him would kill most women) was actually Blackfire, a notorious space pirate from the planet Tamaran hiding out under the radar on a pre-spacetravel world... Particularly when her sister showed up to haul her back to their homeplanet to face trial and she quickly decided her only way out was to burn her and the entire goddamn city to the ground, starting with Duncan's apartment.

That was a rough time, even with the extraterrestrial help, but somehow the two managed to bring down the living, interstellar monument to Duncan's romantic failures before she could quite get around to blowing up the rest of the city. The two aliens vanishing in a burst of light soon after as the younger sister slapped something like handcuffs on her elder, hit a few buttons on her gauntlet activating a teleporter of some kind and enthusiastically waved to him with an uncannily bright grin before she went.

By this point, having dealt with a murderous robot, two cocaine-fueled superfreaks employed by a massive drug cartel his casually genocidal, apparently alien ex-girlfriend and having lost his place of work, his apartment and even his FREAKING CAR in the span of just over a month, Duncan was particularly unimpressed with all the unusual turns his life had taken and looked absolutely ragged staring numbly at what remained of his home on the still-abandoned street.

As he turned to leave, however, he came face to face with his "Uncle" Ted. An old wartime buddy of his Grandfather's from the States he'd known since he was a boy, who took one good look at him and calmly stated-

“Kid, you are not going to your Grandma's house looking like that; you'll give the poor woman a heartattack.”

Wincing at how easily he was recognized, Duncan barely started to ask how the man he hadn't seen since he wrote his driver's exam knew who he was while he was still wearing a mask but was abruptly told to shut up and follow.

Being led to a condo downtown, the boy was sat down in the kitchen, handed a beer and told just about everything.

Ted knew about Duncan's talents because Duncan's Granddad knew. How did his Granddad know? Because he was his Granddad, of course he did and after watching his lil' hooligan get his face kicked in by Metallo on the CBC, the first thing he did was call up his old buddy Ted and ask him to look out for him. And why would he do that?

Because Ted was Wildcat.

To his credit, Duncan was just too damn tired at this point to even be surprised about this revelation, which at this point was pretty much par for the course with how his month had been going. Though he did idly start to wonder if the normal life he thought he'd lost when Metallo showed up had ever even existed in the first place, as he finished his beer and went to sleep on Ted's couch.

Under the guidance of Freaking Wildcat from that point on, the increasingly less rookie hero's life was... well, still pretty damned crazy, but at least it had some semblance of order to it and was a lot less of him just hammering his head against a metaphorical brick wall. Throughout the rest of the year Duncan and Ted went on to, amongst other things, fight off Adonis and his bouncing mechanical pecs, defend a small group of Atlantean refugees looking to escape one of Black Manta's lieutenants and their merry band of murderous fish-men and even teamed up with Robotman to deal with Atomic Skull, who broke out of confinement on a Russian sub en route to Cuba and rammed the damned thing onto the shore. Through all of this he earned an almost folk-hero-like reputation in his country as stubborn and unyielding in a fight, but clearly not in it for the fame with how he acted and dodged the media like the plague and how frank, yet approachable he was with both the people he helped and the Police he often found himself working with.

Still not taking on an actual heroic alias or costume, he came to be seen by his city as... just some guy trying to help out... one of them. Not some paragon placed on a golden, unreachable pedestal above others but a man firmly grounded in his roots; approachable, reliable and most all human. And through all the names they began to call him, from "Hero of Halifax" to "Lion of Nova Scotia", one in particular began to gain traction-

"Champion."

A name he more than earned when, to put the cherry on his whole crazy year, Jack-Tar arrived advertising to anyone who'd listen about his delusions of reuniting the British Empire by force under his enlightened rule. He also brought with him his own immense psychic power, the "Red Coats", his band of murderous metahumans he recruited from across Britain's former territories in Oceania, India, Africa and the Caribbean as well as, and this is important, the ship he stole from Duncan's ex hovering in orbit with all of it's guns pointed down.

Suffice to say, this was not a man who was used to hearing the word "No". So when Duncan refused to join him (with a now famous "No thanks, I'm good."), things got pretty hectic pretty quickly and he, Wildcat and the whole damned city probably would've been wiped off the face of the Earth had not the unusual friendships in strange places "The Champion" had made over the past year not come to fruition. With the Atlantean soldier-turned-refugee "Ultramariner" jumping into the fray, a Tamaranean frigate commanded by his ex's sister jumping into orbit and, eventually, even Robotman arriving with freaking Superman at his back and a cheeky "Kept 'cha waitin', didn't I?" on his robotic voice. Together, the six managed to stop the lunatic Brit before he could quite get around to completely leveling the city and half the province with it, after that well...

The Tamaraneans headed home, but not before their Captain teleported down to the surface to give everyone involved what Superman would later tell him was the traditional greeting on her homeworld; an uncomfortably affectionate bone-shattering hug (which Cliff found absolutely hilarious).

The uncertain ("Uncertain" here meaning "The fuck do you do with a race of sea-dwellers whose King tried to wipe out humanity that one time?") status of the small Atlantean refugee community settled across the bay in neighbouring Dartmouth was greatly improved by Ultramariner's actions that day, and he settled down there in earnest and eventually became that city's local hero.

And Duncan? For his part, after a year of balls-to-the-wall crime, alien and robot fighting insanity, he finally came to terms with the idea that, yeah, he was probably a goddamn superhero now. Moving off of Ted's couch when he went back to Gotham, finding a cozy new place to live in a decommissioned lighthouse just outside of town and taking up the name everyone was calling him anyway to fight crime in a snazzy new outfit the League gave him after the whole Jack-Tar Affair.

A year after that and a few months, The Champion was brought into the League- Apparently at the posthumous request of Cliff himself. And the rest is history.

...Weird, surreal and oftentimes downright crazy history.