3 out of 5

It’s random – the tagline being ‘Because someone demanded it!’ – but it works.  Crossover (with an exclamation point on the cover, but not in the indicia) finds a reason for El Torres creations Nancy (i.e. Nancy in Hell) and Metis (from The Apocalypse Girl) to meet up in Hell, where a demon – now called a ‘spook’ – convinces the latter that the former needs a smackdown in a classic hit-first-ask-questions-later setup.

Unlike the forced Savage Dragon crossover with Nancy, Metis is actually an interesting and semi-logical fit, her own series dealing with life and death and disaster and angels and demons, and the randomness of a phone call that sucks her into Hell is well handled and well paced.  Of course, any one-shot guest star book like this can’t really have all that much impact, and the Nancy we see here is so far removed from the balls-out destroyer of her two series (the third, at this point, not yet completed) that it’s hard to actually link her to the character we’ve known.  Still, with appreciable Torres ingenuity, he completely sidesteps that ‘classic’ setup in a way that is fully aligned with Metis’ personality.

For what it’s worth: I really liked Alberto Hernández’s take on these characters, dolling up Nancy in her usual swimsuit-esque attire but avoiding the excessive cheesecake shots of her series, and the wide open backgrounds – rather gorgeously colored by Hernández and Bruno Lanzarote – offset the zombie / deadite slaughter in the foreground.