Not unless they bring back gigantic Winsor McKay-style full-page illustrations. Or long-form Will Eisner-style comic tales. Otherwise I'll read 'em online. Small one-to-five panel jokes work just as well online.

The last comic I can remember that tried to take any real advantage of the print medium was Calvin and Hobbes.

Might be a viable business. Snail mail weekly full size newsprint filled just with comics from artists wanting to push the medium a little. Call it "The Sunday Funnies."

Mutts makes good use of color and space, but the local paper seems to determined to fuck that up, too.

How?

Watterson convered this in some of Calvin and Hobbes reprint books, but basically, a Sunday strip is at most 12 panels (call it 12 units) long. By modern convention, you have a 4-unit title panel, a 2 unit panel with a single throw away joke (or two 1 unit panels with a throw away joke), leaving 6 units left for the main Sunday joke.

A newspaper then has several options for displaying the Sunday comic. They can run the full 12 units. They can eliminate the 4-unit title and run 8 units. They can also substitute the 4-unit title for a 1-unit title and run a 9-unit strip. They can drop the 2 unit throw-away joke for a 10 unit strip. They can drop the title and throw away joke for a 6 unit strip (smallest they can run).

After Watterson's sabbatical in the early 90s (I think it was 1990), he fought for a full 12-unit (in a 4x3 layout), and won (since his strip was so popular), in which he was able to work without any constraint. He could basically do a huge 1-unit Sunday strip, or a 24 small panel strip, or strips without panels, or what ever he felt was needed for the Sunday strip. The artwork for the late Calvin and Hobbes Sunday strips was phenomenal and probably nothing like it had been seen for 60 or 70 years (and nothing like it since).

Thanks. I remember.

But didn't he remove a special limitation of newspapers instead of exploiting a special feature?

That sounds like an idea for a web app... a comics aggregator. You can even have it be customizable for each user, and have something new every day.

There are a few of those.

They're actually quite vile: The webcomic artists depend on the ad revenue received from people visiting their sites, so the scrapers which aggregate other web comics end up leeching bandwidth while snatching revenue from the content creators.

Yes and no; IIRC the XKCD chap says he makes his money from merchandising. But you're right; people who want their content syndicated set up RSS on their sites and people who don't, don't.