NAPOLEONS OF CRIME: Comics reviews. Big, flaky-pastry, melting-chocolatey napoleons of crime.

X-Statix: Good Guys, Bad Guys. Totally fun, fluffy entertainment about a commercialized, reality-TV superhero team that’s “famous, mutant, and mortal.” Soap operatics, with the expected genuinely moving interludes, and general wigginess. I’d forgotten how much fun X-Statix was. Now I’m going to track down the rest of the series (with the likely exception of whatever happened to their scuttled zombie Princess Diana parody, “Di Another Day”).

I will admit that the art, this time around, went kind of hinkity at points. The comic is drawn in a joyful, poppy-zoomy-wow style, all candy-coated rocketship colors and big thick black lines, and I love it. But this time some of the proportions seemed really off, especially around the mouths.

Still, I had a blast–it’s like a trip to the amusement park, seriously–and the Wolverine/Doop team-up, “The Pink Mink” (drawn by Ed Brubaker, and now I want more from him–any of you all seen his work?), is pure pop pleasure.

Daredevil: Decalogue: Wow. OK, so the Bendis Daredevil arc started out pretty rockin’, what with Matt Murdock being outed as Daredevil and getting in legal trouble and generally having his life go haywire (…again) in a faux-gritty, police-procedural way. But then the arc wavered, and I wondered whether we were seeing more of the thing where Bendis starts off incredible (if you have not read the first volume of Alias, please, pretty please with caramel on top, stop reading my blog and go get it right now!!!) and then loses the plot. I mean, I liked King of Hell’s Kitchen and The Widow quite a bit, and even Golden Age wasn’t a bad idea; but these volumes weren’t firing on all cylinders.

But Decalogue… oh, yeah.

Its genre is crime/horror crossover, rather than the crime/superhero crossover we’ve seen for most of the Bendis arc. It’s set in a church support group for ordinary people affected by Matt Murdock’s public takeover of Hell’s Kitchen. It’s keyed to the Ten Commandments (which leads to the irksome grammatical blurp of titles like “Thou Shall Not Lie,” rather than either “You Shall” or “Thou Shalt,” sigh). It’s Bendis’s first attempt to treat Murdock’s Catholicism, and you know, it really worked for me. I think it’s actually pretty insightful of Bendis to realize that when Daredevil is a Catholic story, it’s more likely to be a horror story than a noir crime/procedural story.

Alex Maleev’s art is beautiful as always, able to capture the glory of the dirtiest parts of New York or the most ordinary woman on the street. I’m reminded of somebody’s description–Harold Bloom?–of Eliot and Milton as the great “poets of women’s hair.” Yeah, Maleev still can’t quite do action sequences, but I have no intention of caring. He gets ordinary human interaction exactly right, bringing depth and individuality to the briefly-glimpsed characters who populate the support group.

I understand that other people will have other perspectives, but for me, Decalogue was pretty close to being the perfect Daredevil story. I got into him because of his local, street-level love of place; his lawyer/vigilante internal division; his Catholicism, obviously; his interactions with friends (usually Foggy, whom I love, but here the also-lovable Milla); the way he couldn’t quite make his life work. This book touches on all of those elements. I completely, stupidly loved it.