Found this today at salon.com...

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/08/09/comics/index.html

That's a really interesting article. I wonder what's going to happen in the next couple years. Will it be a rebirth as McCloud seems to think, or is this just a big passing fad?

The way I see it, everything popular gets commercialised eventually. I have no doubt that practical and secure micropayments will happen - the demand is too big for it not to. I have been reading online comics regularly for nearly four years now, along with millions of others. If a good micropayment system is needed for online comics (and online music, and whatever else) to survive, it will happen.

I stopped getting newspapers because of free online comics plus better news sources online than I can hope for by subscribing to 1 or 2 papers. I've been happily sucking up band width for free, but I admit I would pay newspaper prices to continue doing what I'm doing.