It's the engagingly disrespectful conceit of the Marvel Knights mini-series, Dead Girl, that practically every Marvel character who's passed away over the years —  late superheroes, tragically slain girlfriends, croaked supervillains — winds up spending the afterlife in Hell.

This includes more than one member of Britisher Peter Milligan and Mike Allred's late, lamented (by me, at least) supergroup X-Statix, one of which — egomaniacal black superhero Tike Alicar, the Anarchist — has joined up with a group of nefarious baddies to bust out of the stygian depths. Using a green gloop garnered from the lowest depths of Hell, this motley crew of supervillains (which includes at least two Spider-Man faves, Kraven the Hunter and Mysterioso) are granted 24-hour stays in the living world, which they use to terrorize the populace in order to attract the attention of sorcerer supreme, Doctor Strange. Their goal: to force the good doctor to bring 'em back to life for good.

Hooking up with Dead Girl, who is spending her time in Hell as part of the Dead Sisters Book Club (the membership of which is entirely comprised of faces familiar to long-term Marvel junkies), Strange ventures into Hell and hooks up with several other expired figures, tempting them with the answers to the secrets of resurrection. Why do some superheroes die — and return — when others throw off this mortal coil for good? ("And why does it always seem to happen to the popular ones?" Dead Girl adds.) Is it all, as former X-Statix team leader Mister Sensitive states, just "a game of Snakes And Ladders?" (In America, Pete, we usually call it Chutes & Ladders.) Or is there something deeper at work?

Milligan doesn't really supply the answer, of course — other than to have Strange note that a "mystical process of osmosis" is at play in such matters — but then we didn't really expect him to. The main goal behind Dead Girl, aside from tweaking the rules of Life & Death in the Comics Universe, is to bring a host of well-known and obscure dead folk into the fore- and background of the action. Thus, we get to see another Spidey villain working as an elevator operator in Hell ("Poor guy's fallen on hard times," Dead Girl tells us), and one of the versions of Ant-Man engaged in a half-crazed, never-ending battle against carpet mites.