Books: Banya: The Explosive Delivery Man Vol. #5

And so at last we come to the fifth and final volume of Banya: The Explosive Deliveryman — although at this point we might as well call the series Banya: The Explosive Berserker. We’d started with a character who was instantly likeable and interesting — Banya, the Mailman of the Wasteland — and traded up him up for a character who was far less intrinsically interesting, a Berserker with a Tragic Past. There’s just enough of Banya as we remember him here to justify keeping the name, but really, I was against this whole detour to begin with. I was more interested in Banya when he was actually outsmarting the bad guys, not just slicing them into Salisbury steak.

It’s doubly annoying since most of the climactic plot shenanigans involve a bunch of stuff that could have been phoned in from any fantasy series, really. Most of them revolve around the (re)appearance of Kamutu, the man who was once Banya’s master, now missing an eye and thirsting after the kind of ultimate power that can only be awakened through a little girl. I also groused about the Mysterious Lone Swordsman character, Soah, stirred into the mix as of last volume. All of these things just felt like distractions from the series’ original and most inventive premise: how does Mister DHL-Of-The-Desert deal with getting his delivery to the destination this time? There’s only the faintest hint of that whole idea left in this volume; Banya’s cleverness and wit has mostly been traded up for the sight of him going Rambo on the bad guys.

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