I’ve talked about syndicated comics versus webcomics before. I am excited and pleased by the accelerating collapse of comic strip syndication; like Matt Boyd (whom I quoted in that post, and whose writing makes me doodle our names together on my binder), I am interested in watching it die.

So it’s very, very funny to me that today, I received an unsolicited mass email–yes! spam!–asking me to “help save The Norm,” a syndicated comic strip whose creator just cut himself loose from King Features. It’s also kind of conflicting.

On the one hand, Michael Jantze is doing what I believe all syndicated comics should and will do to survive and prosper–taking back his rights from a syndicate and using the web as his primary distributor. I want to laud that kind of behavior. On the other hand, Jantze is the same guy who infamously took the syndicates’ side in the “Is Print Dead” forum at last summer’s Comic Con, so seeing him thrash the way Penny Arcade did a few years ago fills me with vicious glee.

I should add that the spam email did not appear to be sent to me by anybody directly associated with thenorm.com, but rather by a fan named Adam who probably shouldn’t be abusing his company address like that. I think this only makes the situation more pathetic.

Anyway, as I and a great many other people knew would happen, PvP is now being published for free five times a week in the Philadelphia Evening Standard. Penny Arcade, a strip which once nearly died in its aforementioned thrashings (at the hands of a kind of neosyndicate), is on track to raise more than $300,000 for this year’s Child’s Play. On the subject of who’s winning, for once, Websnark and I are in complete agreement.