Director Bones
40 years ago - Bones is born, the result of a series of in utero experiments on several unwitting pregnant women's fetuses by Benjamin Love, who stages the children's deaths and brings them to his S.H.A.D.E. labs to raise as part of his experiment.
22 years ago - 18-year-old Bones is brought to Uruguay by Benjamin Love whose S.H.A.D.E. labs are closed when they are exposed by Kate Godwin and the Doom Patrol.
21 years ago - 19-year-old Bones is equipped as an enforcer by Benjamin Love.
19 years ago - 21-year-old Bones is used by Benjamin Love to fight Kate Godwin and the Doom Patrol, until Cliff Steele convinces him to turn on his creator and try to make the world better. He turns himself in, and Sandra Knight intervenes in his incarceration, seeing his intention to redeem himself, and helps him apply for suspended sentencing to work as an asset for the DEO.
18 years ago - 22-year-old Bones first meets his handler agent, Cameron Chase. Over time they become partners.
14 years ago - 26-year-old Bones & Frankenstein are stripped of their positions with the DEO by Amanda Waller, made to instead work with Argus as part of the new Freedom Fighters.
10 years ago - 30-year-old Bones works with his former partner Agent Cameron Chase to create their own casefiles while he works with the Freedom Fighters.
6 years ago - 34-year-old Bones gains control of the Freedom Fighters when Amanda Waller loses her position as tactical director of Argus. He consolidates his authority and becoming the head of the DEO with the support of Sandra Knight, moving the Freedom Fighters to the DEO's control and bringing in Dee Tyler at Sandra's recommendation.
1 year ago - 39-year-old Bones permits Kate Spencer, when she is arrested by the DEO, to continue operating as Manhunter, sometimes farming off-the-books assignments to her.
There is a classic well-worn trope in spy fiction; the hero's boss. The 'director of the government organization' character. You see it everywhere. Every secret agent there's ever been has had one, from James Bond to Maxwell Smart to the Six-Million Dollar Man. One of the most fun things comics get to do is get creative with these long-standing tropes, whether that means making your director character an eye-patched, cigar-chomping tough guy with an airship instead of an office, or making them an constantly smoking, scotch-drinking skeleton in a cool suit. Whoever came up with the idea of using previously-invented DC character Bones this way (presumably Dan Curtis Johnson & J.H. Williams III of the series Chase) is just brilliant. It turns the director into a specter of death... behind a desk. The juxtaposition is just great.
Director Bones Comic HistoryDirector Bones has a really weird evolution, because while there's a very clear start to the character as we now know him, he in fact has a whole other comic career that predates it. Bones first arrived in Infinity Inc #16 in 1985, appearing kind of out of nowhere, attacking Lyta Trevor, and kidnapping her for ransom. We later are introduced to the rest of his team, Helix, a group of original characters meant to be enemies of the main team.
"Mister" Bones story, along with the rest of Helix, was that he was the result of in utero experiments by a Doctor Love. Helix had all banded together to mimic the success of Infinity Inc, but were doing it more as criminals. It was a fairly flimsy premise, but the obvious strength was Bones himself. He was clearly designed to play to the strengths of the young artist doing the series, and once you realize that this is being done by Todd McFarlane, the creator of Spawn, the influences at play all start to fall together. His actual costume is a reference to the Golden Age public domain character the Black Terror, but that cape is all McFarlane. Bones continued to appear and eventually actually became a begrudging part of Infinity Inc, but he had to go into hiding when he accidentally killed team leader Skyman. |
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While Bones did appear in the Millennium event along with the rest of Infinity Inc, this marked the end of appearances of this version of the character. Infinity Inc as a whole struggled to find footing in continuity after the Crisis, so minor, peripheral elements like Bones understandably just never got brought up again. It was a full decade before the version of Bones that we all now know, Director Bones, the head of the DEO, made his debut in a series that really gets slept on, the 1998 series Chase, which told the story of DEO agent Cameron Chase. Director Bones appeared occasionally as more of a thematic element, without a lot of effort to explain WHY this former villain and probationary member of a pre-crisis young adult superhero team was now the director of a government agency, but the visual was so striking it immediately just WORKED.
The idea of Director Bones was quickly picked up by practically everyone. He made a ton of appearances in Geoff Johns JSA, and then was just sprinkled everywhere; Martian Manhunter, Titans, Green Lantern, JSA Classified... Whenever anyone needs a shady government agency he's just a perfect visual element. He also seems to work really well in books with a female hero; he's heavily featured in the Kate Spencer Manhunter series, in the Nu52 Batwoman, and the Rebirth Supergirl. I think there's something to the way he sidesteps any sort of potential gender dynamic by just being a creepy skeleton. |
Our Director Bones StoryThe fact that we want Director Bones as the head of our version of the DEO is obvious, but he actually also gave us a surprising wealth of opportunities to build his story, and the world around him. We didn't create ALL of Helix, just Bones himself as the creation of Doctor Love, but in fleshing that story out we actually got a TON of utility out of the Doctor, even using him to give a new origin to Doom Patroller Kate Godwin.
Once we built Bones' backstory, we got to roll our sleeves up and build his career with the DEO. We're making him a part of Amanda Waller's early Freedom Fighters (since we're skipping his time with Infinity Inc) before he becomes a player on the ongoing battle for dominance between Waller and Sandra Knight. I honestly don't know what it is about this character that makes him work so well in female-led stories, but he does, and we wanted to lean into it. Even though we've basically built all of that from scratch, it all just leads to the character existing as we know him; as the shady head of the DEO. We get to use him just like he's used in the comics, creating a cool cloak-and-dagger landscape that many other characters need to thrive. |
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