from what I understand the majority of his traffic came from gaming reddit, which recently turned on him after he did something (don't quote me, but I think it had something to do with cursing someone out who got tired of waiting for a book).
He was very active on Reddit while he was first starting out with comics (he did an IAMA and commented on the site a lot, talked about SEOmoz, too), Reddit revolted on him for possibly using SEO techniques and being rude (insulting critics on twitter, etc), he started redirecting any traffic from the reddit domain to a rickroll page, and now everything seems to be back to normal.
I think soap operas is a more apt way of describing internet drama: hard to follow, last a long time, and when you get right down to it: the content of the drama is very thin, so why bother?
The cursing out episode was from Twenty Seven B Slash Six, not The Oatmeal. And the bigger hubbub was over the fact that the author posted personal information on reddit (trying to confirm someone's shipping address).
Basically someone working SEO used GiantBatFart (The Oatmeal's Reddit username) as an example of people using SEO on Reddit and Digg. Long story short, The Oatmeal got mad.
