The question wasn't whether or not comics is a dying art form. The question is if Bill Watterson BELIEVES that it is, with the suggestion that he might believe so because he possibly doesn't like computers very much and therefore might not be fully aware of web comic artists.

Comics aren't thriving more than ever. Comics peaked in the early 20th century. Look at the internet comics and then look at what people were doing from 1900 up to WW2. They were working with full newspaper pages at times so they were making more use of space than most webcomics. They also had much larger audiences. Ridiculously larger. Tens of millions of fans. Rube Goldberg received a contract to work exclusively for one paper that I think paid around $50000 a year... in the 1910s. The fact that you're talking about crowdfunding at all is a reminder of how far comics have fallen; comics as an independent underground thing is taken for granted now, and crowdfunding is(while incredibly useful) frequently a way to squeeze as much support as is possible from a small audience. The options for that comic market are much better than they were, but the market taking the shape that it has is precisely because of its falling popularity. The equation of superheroes with comic books was similar; in the dying comic book market, superheroes were one genre that survived, but even that survival was fought for in the form of specialty shops for fans; the mainstream support was already lost and the characters maintained popular support through other media like cartoons and films.

It's a dying art form. Just because they are thriving doesnt make them art.

Really? The sort of comic I was thinking of would include, let's see, Sinfest, Romantically Apocalyptic, Drive, SSSS, Questionable Content... I could go on, but each one of these extends the field of comic-strip art along at least one dimension, and outstrips in subtlety anything attempted in newspaper comics. I'd even include XKCD, which certainly wouldn't seem like "art" to a casual glance, but what would you call the well-nigh insane depth of "Time"?

Sinfest: http://sinfest.net/

Romantically Apocalyptic: http://romanticallyapocalyptic.com/

Drive: http://www.drivecomic.com/new.html

SSSS: http://www.sssscomic.com/comic.php?page=1

Questionable Content: http://questionablecontent.net/

XKCD "Time" : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(xkcd)

It's hard to prove it either way, but my suspicion is that there are already more people making their primary living from online comics than there are making their primary living making newspaper comics. And if that isn't true, Patreon will make it true in less than a year from now.

Patreon really is a miracle worker from this sort of niche content. I've seen fairly niche people put up a Patreon campaign, then actually freak out about how much money they end up getting, because you aggregate a couple thousand $1-5/month donations and Holy Shit. (Suddenly it's a Real Job (TM).) It's incredible feasible to go from "scraping by, annoying your parents and friends with what looks like a vow of poverty to do your Stupid Shit and living in constant money stress" to "comfortable middle-class lifestyle with reasonable income assurance". Not perfect, of course, but reasonable.

I mean, look at this: http://www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersmith

Any halfway-well-respected online comic artist not running a Patreon right now needs to get on it.

And Jeph Jacques, from the aforementioned Questionable Content: http://www.patreon.com/jephjacques

Keep in mind these people also still have their other sources of income: book runs, merchandise, etc.

Yes, Patreon is really transformative for those people who haven't had other means of monetizing.

I really think that in the long term Patreon is more important than Kickstarter for the arts. Kickstarter by its nature is much splashier and makes the big news articles, but it's Patreon that changes lives by chugging along month after month after month after month.

Can you imagine what Watterson could get directly from the public on Patreon? Most assuredly a better offer than any newspaper could ever offer him now.

I was thinking that exact same thing (re: Watterson and Patreon) after I wrote that.

Yes, I can't stress this enough. I'm an investor in Patreon, but I've also been working closely with artists (like Zach) for the last few years as we've managed + run their crowdfunding campaigns on kickstarter and the like.

Patreon is the next stage in the evolution. It is my belief that this platform will spur the second renaissance for creators who can at last focus entirely on their art without just one well-funded patreon (e.g., Harper Lee and To Kill A Mockingbird).

Woah, Drive is still updating? I thought he basically got too busy, the updates seemed to be once every month or two. Must have changed RSS feeds on me or something.