Books: Banya: The Explosive Delivery Man Vol. #2

The current crop of reviews for The Bourne Ultimatum describe it as one big non-stop chase scene. That’s kind of how Banya: the Explosive Deliveryman plays out, too. Take our hero (Banya, the “Postman of the Wasteland”), give him a goal, send about six thousand bad guys after him, and watch him run, run, run until he either keels over or actually accomplishes what he set out to do. Back at the end of Volume 1 Banya was high-tailing it through the blighted desert that makes up a good chunk of his world, with a package under one arm and a cadre of death merchants nipping at his heels. Not the most original setup, to be sure, but Banya makes it work by simply putting its head down and charging forward through this premise at top speed.

Banya has three approaches to any given problem, used in this order: 1) run the heck away, 2) trick your enemies into feuding amongst themselves, and 3) kill ‘em yourself. All three get used here. That oversized kitchen knife hanging from his waist is there for a reason, and right in the first pages of this volume he puts it to good use — he blinds one of his pursuers with a smoke bomb, then severs the poor sap’s hamstring. (There’s more, but it happens out of frame.) When one of his own friends’ lives also happens to be on the line — in this case, his “sister” Mei — he has all the more reason to slice someone up. But on the whole, he’d either run faster than they can, or use another time-honored tactic you can employ when you’re bracketed by different varieties of enemies: Why kill them when you can get them to kill each other? Mei, too, now a prisoner of the same gang of goons after Banya’s package, improvises wildly to stall her captors … until Banya shows up and pulls off a diversion, and lands them both in possibly even bigger trouble.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.