I wonder if Watterson really believes the gag line for the third strip, "Nah, the art form's dying"? He might, being (apparently) a neo-luddite of some sort. But there has never been as many, or as good, comics as there are now, or as many busy, thriving comic artists. Hint: they are not found at gocomics.com.
I seriously doubt it. As an art form, newspaper comics are going the way of newspapers, but comics in general are thriving more than ever. The Internet has provided the perfect platform for them, and crowdfunding works quite well for strips with a following.
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.