Nemo Balkanski
“I remember a time of chaos, this wasted land…” is a part of the opening monologue spoken by the Great Northern Tribe’s leader and chief in George Miller’s cult film The Road Warrior.
This brutal, anti-utopian environment of Mad Max is only one of the worlds in the rich heritage of international film and comic books, with which The Deliverer, the new comic book by Nemanja Moravic Balkanski, is engaged.
There have been many heroes in the history of comic books, but there is only one pizza deliverer. By skillfully playing with the stereotypes of mainstream super hero comics, Balkanski, in this full-bloody work of his, manages to deliver a half-confessional phantasmagoria of devastating potential that will leave nobody indifferent. He chose a lucid combination of realism and caricature and built an autochthonous style, worthy of the great Moebius. Above all, his style is evocative of another, largely neglected artist, Roberto Raviola Magnus.
Balkanski’s favorite artist is Hermann. He writes inventive dedications to Moebius, but his original role model is Magnus. The stories of childhood leave indelible marks and Magnus’ Alan Ford comes as Balkanski’s earliest comic book influence. Alan Ford is the fate of the world. There is weird humor in the script, hilarious variations of the farcical in the illustrations and an affinity for the bizarre. All of those ingredients link Alan Ford and The Deliverer. Sexually explicit content is what divides them because Balkanski loves to mock the perverse.
Vancouver is the city where the Deliverer and his creator live. Vancouver is the stage, the world is the theme. Through dreamlike scenes, with fierce social satire, Balkanski reached the universal. By tackling the problems of reality TV and other stumbles and falls of our society, The Deliverer points to a world that’s just about to lose balance. The cover of this comic book is cautionary. The Deliverer with a shotgun in his hand could be as close as to blowing our heads off, and Nemanja Moravic Balkanski is sending the message that, on the edge of imperial America, far from Serbian partocracy, he is able to create his fantastic comics.
Author: Djordje Maric
In 2016. “The Deliverer” was nominated for Joe Shuster Award in Gene Day category.
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