This book starts with Doctor Strange having hemmorhoids.
A villain named Pitiful One gets the power to reanimate the dead—but only for 24 hours at a time. He picks Anarchist, Kraven the Hunter, Miss America and Mysterio as his personal army.
\As Dead Girl notes, only the popular kids tend to get resurrected (although I’m not sure Miss America or Anarchist count as popular).
Doc Strange decides he needs help and calls upon Dead Girl (who is hanging out with other dead girls)…
The life of the dead includes book clubs.
In order to animate her, Doc needs a special magic orb.
He then throws her soul into some stuff from a costume shop…
…and a bunch of sandwiches and fresh garbage. Seriously.
We’re not even halfway in and already this is AWESOME.
The bad guys want to force Strange to reanimate them permanently, so they kidnap Wong to force his hand. They take Wong to Hell, where he meets, among others, The Ancient One (really? He’s in Hell?). Strange and Dead Girl assemble their own team (Ant-Man, Phantom Rider, and Mister Sensitive) and a guy called Piano Player.
While Doctor Strange’s astral self is in the land of the dead, the villains raise themselves from death again and try to force Wong to tell them where to find Doctor Strange’s unconscious, Earth-bound body.
Wong doesn’t give up anything because he’s cool like that.
Ancient One ends up having evil intent, and is allied with Pitiful One, and together they almost defeat the powers of justice.
By the end Strange’s team wins (of course) and he puts Ancient One in a bottle.
There is so much more to this book. Having it take place in Hell means we get to see tons of dead characters ranging from other members of X-Statix to Harry Osborn and more (see the tags below). You NEED to read this series.
The only reason this isn’t an A+ is because it doesn’t “matter.” A+ books must both be fantastic on an artistic level as well as significant in terms of continuity.