If someone were to make a world based on this concept, there are so many metaphysical and philosophical concepts they could touch on and they could work off each other in such compelling ways. It'd probably make for one hell of a read
This idea is fun and creative. My original comment was a bit flippant. However, I do feel like it did bring up an issue in combining comic book characters with belief systems of people in real life that has impact on their actions. Separating the world into good and evil characters doesn't reflect real life and real people. The characters in the comics are personifications of concepts. No person is just good or just evil. I'm sure no one here is trying to pretend that this reflects real life and that this is just a fun thought experiment. However, having the purgatory concept itself is one of the ways that people over the years have justified villifying people. They can pretend that there are good and bad people. In order for there to be pure villains, you'd have to assume perfect knowledge, perfect experience, perfect ability and perfect free will. No one has that. When comics turn into movies, sometimes the villains get more fleshed out and people can relate to them better. That's sometimes when it's less fun to villify them. Mixing caricatures of good and evil with the real life belief of some people in the concept of purgatory has me a little uneasy that people might actually think that it might be an accurate reflection of real life. It is not.
I don't think you have too much to worry about. For one, superhero comics tend to be a little lacking in subtlety and I think that gives them some of their charm. It might even be a trope (though the term is a bit nebulous to me). So when you have a very binary heroes=good and villians=bad style of storytelling, it works based on that alone. Because they're hero stories and because they're simplistic, chances are they won't be taken to seriously by their readers. In order for there to be pure villains, you'd have to assume perfect knowledge, perfect experience, perfect ability and perfect free will. No one has that. There are a few different ways to approach this, theologically, but I think in its most simple form, purgatory is a place where souls are awaiting to ascend into heaven and any suffering that takes place (if there is suffering in purgatory) is temporary. Therefore any person who is in purgatory cannot be at their core evil, because if they were they wouldn't be there in the first place. Personally, I kind of like that metaphor because that would mean even the worse of the villians in superhero comics will eventually be spiritually cleansed and will eventually go to heaven. It creates another layer to the story where anyone can redeem themselves, no matter how serious or how numerous their past mistakes.However, having the purgatory concept itself is one of the ways that people over the years have justified villifying people. They can pretend that there are good and bad people.