Charles Yoakum recently had an entry on his blog where he discusses the concept of a bridge comic. Exactly what is a bridge comic? I’ll let him explain:

[The] comic tht (sic) would allow the reader to move gracefully from the Ritchie rich to the fantastic four to Kill your boyfriend in three easy steps and 30 years worth of maturity.

He feels that the bridge comic isn’t relevant anymore and explains why quite well:

I believe that the notion of the crossover comic is not one that is particularly relevant anymore, if we could accept the premise that the person who is likely to rent Terminator 2: The Director’s Cut is not generally the same consumer who rented Mansfield Park, or is going to go pay to see Becoming Jane. What those two people have in common most is a love for the film medium, and an understanding a) of the storytelling conventions of the medium and b) that Terminator 2: The Director’s Cut is not an acceptable choice as date night.

And I think he has a point.  People that read X-Men aren’t generally going to be the ones to leap onto the indie bandwagon and indie readers aren’t going to really care much for X-Men.  They cater to two different tastes.

The bridge never really worked for me.  When I was a kid I read a lot of Archie comics but didn’t really care much for Batman.  All the more mature Archie comics didn’t really appeal to me and the attempts by Archie Comics to get me to read their action series always failed.  It wasn’t until I went through my first phase of not caring about comics that I found Batman, Daredevil, etc later on.  The same goes for indie comics.  I eventually stopped caring about what DC/Marvel was putting out around ‘96.  Went through 2 years where I didn’t read anything then ended up reading some Dark Horse and was hooked.  As the years have gone by I’ve only slipped deeper into indie and compliment how skittish indie can be by reading some mainstream.  There never really was a comic series that bridged that gap.