1 {scene: The League of Good Guys' super headquarters!}
1 Worm Master: {incredulous} The Hippo is going to rob the First National Bank today?
1 Captain Spatula: How did you find that out?
1 Refractive Man: {on the computer} Critical success on my Research roll!
2 Me: Stay in character please...
3 Refractive Man: I Googled and found his blog!
3 [Screen]: {showing The Hippo's LiveJournal page} Robbing bank today, w00t!
3 [Screen]: I have everything set to go! I only need to pack my bags and head over to the bank, so that I may smash my way in and grab as much cash as my bags can hold.

Yes folks, Dean Stahl has been busy and drawn the artwork for another Supers strip.

The way we do these is that I come up with the script and some basic scene layout, then let Dean go to town on the artwork. He's pretty busy and does this for fun, so it takes him a while, but it's worth the wait. He supplies the artwork to me without dialogue balloons, so I can lay it out with the photo. (For the first three strips he drew the balloons himelf, but we had some problems with legibility when the art was reduced to fit the standard IWC strip size. The new method is working much better.)

The bonus art here shows you what the first panel looks like as Dean sends it to me. It's a shame some of the art has to be covered by the dialogue, really.

And Dean wanted to add his own comment:

I'm paying homage to the King of comic book artists, Jack Kirby, with the use of the Kirby Dots behind Dino-Boy. Jack was one of the greatest artists ever and invented the splotchy energy signature that's almost a staple of the medium.

---

2013-08-13 Rerun commentary: I didn't supply a link before, but here are two explaining Kirby dots: choose your poison: Wikipedia or TV Tropes.

If you look closely in the comic you can see that The Hippo's alias is Maximillian Waterhorse. This is derived from the etymology of the word hippopotamus, from the Greek hippos meaning horse, and potamos meaning river. The constructed word therefore means "horse of the river", or as it is sometimes written "water-horse".

Interestingly, hippos are not very closely related to horses at all (not really any closer than both being mammals). The closest living relatives of the hippopotamus are actually the cetaceans: whales and dolphins. Whales and hippos share a more recent common ancestor than hippos and any other mammals. Pretty cool, huh?