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Is the "url" element intended to be a web page displaying the comic -- with banner ads and suchlike -- or just the image of the comic strip itself? Obviously the former will be preferred by commerical comic-strips web sites, the latter by amateurs who value being able to knit together their own comics page.
You could replace the use of the "url" element with an XHTML "object" element. This would allow the use of arbitrary multimedia formats in the rendering of the comic strip. Nested "object" tags allow for the author to offer the content in a variety of formats, and for the consumer to choose the one that is best for them.
Your example uses a single GIF document to represent all four panels. An alternative approach is to use one GIF or PNG per panel (example: http://www.alleged.demon.co.uk/pdc/fabulous.html) or to have the story represented as several pages, each containing several panels (example: http://www.alleged.demon.co.uk/jrd/r12-1.html). My suggestion for handling this is as follows.
First add an optional element "page" which goes within a "strip" element and encloses some of the "panel" elements Newspaper stips will generally not need to be subdivided in to pages; comic books will.
Second to allow the "object" (or "url") element to appear as a child of "strip", "page" or "panel"; the "object" in the smallest enclosing scope is the one containing the current panel.
Third, "panel" elements can be decorated with the "shape" and "coords" attributes used to describe areas in client-side immage maps ("area" elements in XHTML). The idea is that the panel says which part of the image represented by the "object" tag represents this panel.
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