I wonder what'll happen to all the "premium content"...
Will he try to shift it over to some other iteration of the floundering subscription/micropayments model or do you think he'll just dump it all on the main site or what?
If he's actually serious about getting the strip rolling again, it wouldn't be the worst way to jumpstart the merch-sales model that seemed to make the guy good bank at the strip's height to have a big archive binge of that stuff to gruffle through. Or to as a mechanism to a relaunch with some ads and, again, draw people back in for that model.
I just don't think that the subscription/micropayment model was ever gonna work for most web comics or could ever on a long term basis.
It's too quick a read, any given day of a strip, and we're too mentally programmed to think of the medium as a throw-in to a newspaer still.
Maybe if there was someday one mostly-unified central iTunes/Netflix clearing house of web comics, I guess it could be beaten into working, but that's a ways off if it's ever gonna be possible.