By Zack Quaintance — After adhering to the one panel concept implied by the name of this feature with a post this morning, we are back to packing in multiple panels, as we’ve done every week since these features started earlier this year. The reason the first post adhered to the concept was that book had a double-page splash that just summed up its entire concept so well.

In this second feature on Skulldigger and Skeleton Boy #3, readers got multiple panels that could lay claim to that, all illustrated by one of the single best artists making comics today — Tonci Zonjic, colored here by the best-ever, Dave Stewart. This book has been fantastic since it debuted late last year, an excellent start for the Black Hammer universe that is taking place now that the main storyline on the farm has ended.

Enjoy the panels!

Skulldigger and Skeleton Boy #3

This set of three panels is just so well done. It stands well on its own visual merits, using excellent angles and framing that flow well and look varied. There’s also stellar color work to convey the lightning strike, which is at the same time a great homage to landmark cover for The Dark Knight Returns (1986) by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson. So good.

Here we have an epic entrance by our anti-hero in this book, one that like the panels selected above is another excellent Batman homage, like this entire comic is really. Like all the other panels in this feature, this one shows off Zonjic’s phenomenal eye for perspective.

The sense of dread and pacing in this comic is excellent, making it one of those books that readers will tear through, hanging on every last page turn. Again, this owes in part to a Batman homage. The vast majority of Black Hammer readers are certainly well-versed in the classic stories of the medium, especially those that have to do with superheroes, otherwise they wouldn’t be picking these books up. Skulldigger and Skeleton Boy #3 has a real sense of the famous Batman story, Death in the Family to it, an idea that an unhinged maniac is liable to murder a superheroes young protege. Throughout this entire issue, I found myself thinking about Jason Todd, and it added a sense of foreboding that served the book well. Anything can happen in the world of Black Hammer too, unlike in the corporate-owned superhero books that inspire it.

Finally, this last panel is here because you don’t often see white space (and white haze) used as effectively to convey visual storytelling as this panel and its inset.

Click here for past installments of One Hot Panel.

Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.