Comic book character owned and published by DC Comics. He was created by Roy Thomas, Dann Thomas, and Todd McFarlane, and he made his first appearance in July 1985's Infinity, Inc. #16

He has a thoroughly weird origin and career track, so buckle up, and let's go. 

His real name is Robert Todd, and he got his start because a sleazy gynecologist named Dr. Benjamin Love experimented on six pregnant women with a mutagenic drug. Each of the women gave birth to a super-powered kid, and Dr. Love kidnapped all of them. He raised and educated them himself, but kept them hidden away inside his house. 

Robert's powers were mostly awful for him. He has superhuman strength, which is good, but the rest of his powers were fairly horrific. His skin, flesh, muscles, and organs were transparent, so he looked like a walking skeleton. And his skin exudes cyanide. So anyone who touches him dies. So Dr. Love and the rest of his "siblings" call him Mister Bones.

Anyway, once the kids have grown up, they find Dr. Love's diary, learn what he did to them, and decide to kill him. And they send Bones out into the desert with Dr. Love to execute him. And the guy with the poison skin and grim-reaper face can't bring himself to do it, and he lets the doc go. He makes a fake grave so the others will think he killed him, and they all decide to become supervillains together, forming the villain team Helix, mostly targeting the hero team, Infinity, Inc., who were the children of the original Earth-2 version of the Justice Society of America

Bones was not a particularly enthusiastic supervillain, getting captured by Infinity Inc., freed by Dr. Love, and then kidnapped by a Helix teammate called Carcharo, a shark-like monster who unwisely bit Bones' leg clean off, immediately dying of cyanide poisoning. Bones got an artificial leg, and he and Infinity, Inc.'s Doctor Midnight became friends during his recovery. He allied with Infinity, Inc. often, though it took a while for the heroes to accept him. During the wedding of Hector "Silver Scarab" Hall and Lyta "Fury" Trevor, a team of villains called Injustice Unlimited planned to attack and kill as many superheroes as they could. A villain called Harlequin disguised herself as one of the heroes and lured Bones and Skyman (better known as the Golden Age hero the Star-Spangled Kid) away from the group, where she had Solomon Grundy force Bones to touch Skyman with his bare hand, killing him instantly. 

Bones was guilt-ridden and left the team. Around the same time, Dr. Love tried to get Helix to kill him -- but they killed Love instead while still rejecting Bones. Infinity, Inc. finally granted Bones full membership in their team, but they broke up soon afterwards. 

The next time Bones appeared, he wasn't a superhero or a supervillain -- he was a bureaucrat. He was the director of the Department of Extranormal Operations, a federal agency tasked with regulating and monitoring metahumans. He wore a nice suit all the time, and he smoked a lot. This meant half the time you saw him, he was a suit-wearing skeleton in a dark, smoke-filled room, and he looked intimidating as hell. As Director Bones, he appeared irregularly in a number of different comics, but he had a much more important role within the larger DC Universe. He generally had his heart in the right place -- keeping people safe and promoting law and order -- but his methods often put him in conflict with superheroes -- he either wanted them strictly regulated and deputized -- or he wanted them out of the hero business or even in prison. 

Weird Bits of Trivia: Bones tended to rhyme everything he said during his early career. And it turned out, if you managed to make his skin visible, he was a Black man. 

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