Over at his blog, Modern Tales founder Joey Manleytalks about major changes, including moving away from a subscription model for webcomics:

As you may have heard, we’ve decided to open up the vast majority of the site to non-paying readers, and to recruit even more webcomics to join us on a free basis, while maintaining our tightly-focused editorial mission. You’ll see those new free strips roll out in the coming weeks and months. The new editor for the free section of our site, who will be posting here soon, will have more to say on that subject. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy the new Modern Tales, and I hope you tell your friends, who may have been curious about the site in the past, but were maybe turned off by the need to pay.

Don’t get me wrong. The subscription model is not going away. If you are a subscriber, we thank you tremendously much; we owe everything to you — and you can look forward to a fresh set of subscriber-only webcomics coming your way in the coming weeks and months. Subscriptions still make up an important part of our business, and we will continue to take that part of the site seriously. Expansions in the subscription-only part of the site are made possible by the new business model, and will keep pace with the free expansion. I trust that our subscribers will be the people who actually gain the most by this new Modern Tales.