By Nemanja Moravic Balkanski & various (the Publishing Eye)
ISBN: 978-0-986844-01-0
As I’ve often stated, some comics creators seduce and beguile whilst others choose to inform and affect with confrontational shock tactics. One of the most evocative and uncompromising efforts that I’ve ever seen came from Belgrade émigré Nemanja Moravic “NeMo†Balkanski. Don’t just take my word for it, track down his stunning FIB Chronicles, compiling much of his early material. …And now he’s done it again…
Balkanski was born in Belgrade in 1975 and, after indulging in and mastering a multitude of artistic disciplines from comics to graphic design, theatre arts to film-making, and poetry to performance, emigrated to Vancouver in 2007. When not working as an Art Director or storyboard artist for big and little screen productions he continues to produce thought-provoking comics.
It has all clearly been an inspirational experience and NeMo – a skilful plunderer of social tropes and cultural memes – has absorbed the meat and ephemera of his new environs to produce a stunningly confrontational allegory and state-of-the-union fairy tale with plenty of bite.
Canada, not long from now: society is on the edge of collapse and has been for as long as anyone can recall. And that’s not long: crass, shallow media has all but lobotomised the people, making them sensation-seeking celebrity-hungry drones told how to think and act and especially what to buy from the rich bastards to own everything.
King of those rats is the aged billionaire whose Watchmaker Labs and Watchmaker Studios strives tirelessly to mechanise and monetise every last iota of humanity and spirituality. They have already successfully commoditised sport and sex and are close to replacing their fragile flesh-&-blood customer base with mechanical hybrids…
A land like that expects its citizens to do nothing more than work and be consumers, so it employs a certain kind of lawkeeper: semi-cyborg sadists like Canuck, macho psychotics such as talking police dog Le Chien, lickspittles like Token Indian Winnetou and even sometimes starry-eyed do-gooders like hapless Mountie Sergeant Prickstone, but they’re just not enough to keep order in a city which – although tacitly owned by Watchmaker – still moves to its own decadent rhythms…
When uncompromising natural force Cayenne the Shark eats half of Vancouver – despite the army of gigantic robotic buildings and trucks slowly superseding humanity – a new kind of champion emerges.
The Deliverer used to bring pizza to the slavishly mass media-addicted self-medicating hoi-polloi, making money to buy time with certified sex-worker Lula, but as the end rushes closer he finds that selfishly helping himself is actually working to repair the world…
Clearly the world is made up of far more than what Watchmaker can grasp in his withered, grasping hands and as Prickstone and the Deliverer join the Vancouverite Underground to help the declining First Nation regain their stolen mystic Mojo a concatenation of unlikely circumstances look like turning them into Canadian humanity’s last hope of survival…
Abstruse, blackly humorous, shockingly explicit, complacently violent and bleakly hilarious, this disquieting parable uses the modern go-to story form of the summer Action Blockbuster to tenaciously attack media mass-produced self-image and the casual hypocrisy which runs the world and picks enough scabs off that you simply have to stop and think.
This substantial full-colour landscape-format hardback is another strident, sardonically whimsical cartoon diagnosis of the state of our society: a uniquely entertaining read the brave and bold and reasonably old must not miss…
© 2015 The Publishing Eye.
Why not scope out the official website and trailer at http://www.thepublishingeye.com/books/the-deliverer/