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Jones broke into comics in the
early 1970s when he moved to New York City from his native Kansas City,
Missouri,
looking for work as a comics artist. He made his professional debut with
Major
Publications' black-and-white horror-comics magazine Web of Horror
#3 (April 1970), writing and drawing the six-page story "Point Of View".
Jones went on to write for Warren Publishing's black-and-white horror-comics
Creepy and Eerie,
and, under the pseudonym Philip Roland, for rival
Skywald's line. During this time he
wrote his first novel, The Contestants.
Bruce later freelanced for Marvel Comics, writing stories for Ka-Zar
and Conan the
Barbarian, as well as writing and drawing anthological science fiction and other stories for Marvel's
black-and-white magazine line. In 1979, Bruce met April Campbell
and formed a writing partnership. From 1982-1984, Jones and Campbell,
who formed the company Bruce Jones Associates, packaged, edited, and chiefly wrote the Pacific Comics titles Twisted Tales
and Alien Worlds,
as well as Somerset Holmes, Silverheels, and Pathways
to Fantasy. During this time, Jones published the short story collection The
Twisted Tales of Bruce Jones, with a cover and occasional
illustrations by Richard Corben. When Pacific went bankrupt after
publishing several issues of Bruce Jones Associates' comic book line,
subsequent issues were published by Eclipse Comics.
In the late 1980s,
Bruce wrote artist Richard Corben's "Rip in Time" series, published in
TK, and he played the
space pilot in the "Relief Station" segment of Corben's and
co-writer-director Christopher Wheate's direct-to-video feature The Dark Planet. By
the early 1990s, Jones had shifted to screenwriting, working on HBO's The
Hitchhiker TV series and several television movies with writing partner and now-wife
April Campbell Jones. He also wrote a series of thriller novels
including Sprinter, Maximum Velocity, and Game
Running. From 1990 to 1992, Bruce took over as writer of the
newspaper comic strip Flash Gordon,
then drawn by Ralph Reese, occasionally assisted by
Gray Morrow. He returned to
Kansas City with
his wife and children in 2000 and wrote two more novels, Still
Life and Death Rites, under the pseudonym Bruce Elliot.
In 2001, he was
contacted by Marvel editor Axel Alonso, with whom Bruce had worked when Alonso was
at rival company DC Comics. Alonso offered him a job scripting the
then-floundering comic The Incredible
Hulk. Sales of the title rose significantly,
and in 2003, Bruce noted that he planned to stay on as Hulk
writer "until they [Marvel] throw me off". However, the following year
he signed a two-year contract with rival company DC Comics. In the interim, he scripted the
five-issue series Call of Duty: The Precinct #1-5, a
naturalistic drama about the New York City Police
Department.
Other work includes a
seven-issue stint on Nightwing, a Deadman
series for Vertigo, and various limited series
for DC comics, including Man-Bat, OMAC, and
Vigilante.
In 2005, Bruce's
10-page story "Jenifer" from Creepy #63 (July
1974), drawn by Bernie Wrightson, became the basis for filmmaker
Dario Argento's segment of Masters of
Horror, a Showtime television series. The "Jenifer" episode was an erotically
tinged horror story involving a deformed young woman which provided
Argento with his best critical notices in years.
In 2008, he
started a new series, The War
that Time Forgot.
In 2008, he also replaced Greg Rucka as the writer for "Checkmate".
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