[3] The title was taken from a character name in the 1922 children's book The Velveteen Rabbit,[4] where one passage reads: "'Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse, 'It's a thing that happens to you ... Then you become Real.'"

Dr. Dennis "Tip" Wilkin, a relatively new field operative and the only fully human employee of Project Skin Horse, was a decorated former captain of the U.S. Army, a trained psychologist, a passionate cross-dresser and an almost supernatural seducer.

Her safety phrase, "Blueberry waffles", to suspend her aggression patterns, was only revealed by Anasigma after Project Skin Horse had spent a fortune on obedience classes.

During the story arc "Railway Children," she consumeed a vast quantity of artificially produced brains, and with it gained superhuman intelligence levels.

The administrative leader of Project Skin Horse, Gavotte was a collective being consisting of a swarm of bees that thought with a single female mind.

A young adult, introduced in the "I Can Fly" story arc,[6] video game obsessive Nick was unknowingly co-opted into "Project Whirligig".

In spite of Nick's love of shooting virtual bad guys, he abhored the thought of killing real people, and so he joined the Skin Horse team.

[13] Comic Book Resources (reviewing the first collected volume) called it "delightful" and "laugh-out-loud funny, in the way that the Marx Brothers were funny", and lauded it for "deliver(ing) a gag every day and also build(ing) up a larger storyline", comparing the "easygoing" and "simple, cartoony" art to Walt Kelly, but faulted Garrity's "tendency to crowd the panels with text: "the dialogue really sparkles, but it also takes up a lot of space on the page.