meganbmoore | Banya: The Explosive Delivery Man Vol 1 (Reply)

Neutral parties in a world where humans and a race called the Torren(big ugly guys, of course) are at war, the young delivery men(and one girl) of the Gaya Desert Post Office will go to any lengths to safely deliver their packages and messages. In the real world, that’s mean snow, tornadoes and traffic jams. In this world, it means warzones, deserts, and carnivorous monsters. Our hero is Banya, the wildest and most reckless of the bunch.

When we meet Banya, he has to deliver a message to the general of a fortress under seige. To get to the general, he smears his face with blood and pretends to be a dead body, slithering along the ground when to Torren are watching. To get inside the fortress, he uses a pole to vault the walls, kills the Torren on the battlements, and saves the general’s life. When the general asks him to deliver a message to his superiors that could turn the tide of the war, Banya makes him pay the going rate. Plus hazard pay. Banya is a delivery man of strict principles.

Banya became a delivery man four years ago when a young delivery "man" in training, Mei(the token female delivery man, though I guess there could be more in the larger organization) found him wild in the woods. Despite the fact that he was eating a cute animal at the time, Mei understood her duty as the heroine and took him home like a stray puppy. Banya understood his duty as the shounen hero and offered her a piggyback ride for making her cry, and lets her beat him up. Their interactions (and especially Mei herself) make me think a lot of Ed and Winry in Fullmetal Alchemist. Somewhere along the way, they acquired Kong, a young delivery man in training.

Things are going just peachy until Banya and Kong find a man named Yuma wounded and passed out in the desert and take him home (they were probably worried that if they left him, Mei would find out and ht them.) When he wakes up, he reveals that he’s being chased and is trying to deliver a message for his lord, and hires Banya to deliver the message for him because he’s wounded. After Banya leaves, though, Yuma’s enemies find him and Mei offers to guide them to Banya if they’ll spare her and Kong’s lives. Mei, of course, plans to lead them the wrong way and, like any Damsel in Distress worth rooting for, gives them hell and makes them work for it. I’m assuming the next volume or two is the "save the girl" arc.

To be honest, like most shonen, it’s not really plotty yet. "Here’s the world, here’s the badass hero, here’s the spunky heroine, here’s the plucky sidekick, here are the badguys, aaaannnndddd….GO!" But still it’s rather fun, and I like the characters. The art style is also of the manwha art style I prefers, which rather resembles a manga version of photography of US comic book art, as opposed to the more shojo-y manwha art, which, with rare exceptions, tends to distract me and throw me out of a story (I’m thinking about the Bride of the Water God type of art…while I really like it there, I usually find manwha draw in that style hard to follow, visually.)