There is a really weird ambiguity of style in that example, but for the purposes of this contest, pixel art doesn't necessarily equal sprite art. Your example is pixel art, which leans more towards hand-drawn. Again, there's a good deal of ambiguity here; if you have any more examples, feel free to ask! If you want to create a small set of sprites to use in your own comic, that's fine; if they look like sprites in the end, that's what we're going for. The sprite style is a subset of pixel art and we're going for the former more than the latter. As long as your comic can still load fairly quickly. (There's nothing against splitting into multiple pages if a single image would be of excessive length.)