The Fall 2019 Manga Guide

Combatants Will Be Dispatched

What's It About? 

Agent Six is a cog in the machine of the grand evil organization that is Secret Society Kusaragi. Their mission is a simple one: Conquer the Earth. But their ambitions don't just end at total control of our little blue rock. If Alexander wept for he had no more worlds to conquer, then to avoid the same miserable fate, this cabal of dastardly devils will simply turn to alternate universes to get the high of conquest and pillaging. And so Six and his companion/handler ‘Pretty-Girl Android Alice’ journey to a fantasy world straight out of Tolkien and infiltrate the ranks of their military forces in order to achieve their nefarious ends.

But between Six's snide and lackadaisical nature and an incoming demon invasion, they have their work cut out for them. The world could be there's for the taking, but before that, Six will have to fight his nature even before the world around him. If he's up to it, that is. Which he's probably not.

Combatants Will Be Dispatched! is based on the Light Novel series by Natsume Akatsuki. This manga adaptation is illustrated by Masaaki Kiasa, with character designs by Kakao Lanthanum. It is available from Yen Press, retailing for $6.99 digitally and $12.99 phyically. The original Light Novel is also available from Yen Press.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

This is one of those titles where I wavered between a 2.5 and a 3, but I ended up going with the lower because, while I understand where the humor is coming from, it just largely did not work for me. That may change when I read the source light novel, because it's from the same author who created KONOSUBA, which is one of my favorites. This, however, appears to rely more on scantily-clad women, the fact that the hero is actually evil, and some character types who felt, frankly, funnier in the straight fantasy series.

The premise of Combatants Will Be Dispatched! is great: a guy who has been working for Kisaragi, an evil organization bent on world domination, is sent to conquer (or at least begin the conquest of) another planet, which turns out to be a Medieval-style fantasy world. This allows Natsume Akatsuki to play with isekai tropes without technically writing isekai, which is a fun idea and gives him more room for parody. The problem is that it feels much more like sci fi KONOSUBA than its own story – Number Six (he's apparently forgotten his own name, which I desperately want to believe is a Get Smart TV show reference) is like a more obnoxious Kazuma, Snow is Mean Darkness, and Grimm feels like a basic “desperate single woman” trope, albeit with service to a god of undeath thrown in. All of this makes what should feel like a fresh story decidedly stale, less like the author is creating a new take on an increasingly ubiquitous genre and more like a one-trick pony.

None of this is to say that there aren't some genuinely funny moments. Dryly sarcastic android Alice is a consistently fun character and the comments about how bad guys just love to wear skimpy clothing is so spot-on that it feels funny. Each of the characters has their moments of creative humor (maybe not Snow, but I may also be unreasonably irritated by her), and Masaaki Kiasa's art does a good job of working with all of these facets of the writing to enhance them. Jokes about groping a woman's breasts or flipping up her skirt are so stale as to be inedible (so to speak), but given that they grant Six the “evil points” he needs to request equipment from Kisaragi, they at least attempt to justify their existence.

I can't wholeheartedly say that this is a good or fun manga, but I do suspect that the first-person narration of the original novel may clear up some of these issues. Unless you're dramatically opposed to reading novels, I'd say check those out first, because this just doesn't entirely work as a whole.

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Faye Hopper

Rating:

In fiction, it's oftentimes fair to say the perspective of the main character is meant to directly reflect the values of the author. In light novel-based isekai this goes doubly, because of how those stories are often addressed directly to their core audience. Whether the main character is Kirito (hypercompetence and tabula rasa personality the reader is meant to wallow in and live vicariously through; an aspirational, I-wish-I-was-this-cool figure) or Subaru (the author reflecting on and critiquing their own otaku anxieties), the worldview of the main character is often the clearest window into the worldview of the author. Understanding this is key to why I absolutely loathed Combatants Will Be Dispatched!.

Because Agent Six is terrible. He's a jackass who equates snarky distaste with insight and has no problem grabbing the breasts of a female character in order to violently get back at her; put her in place. An actual, misogynistically charged act of sexual assault. And not the only one in the book, mind you. There's skirt lifting and setting the spoken activation password of a crucial piece of technology to ‘cock carnival’ in order to embarrass a young princess. These are bitter, needlessly cruel acts of impotent male rage. And yet, that's not how they're framed. They're framed as blithe, casual. Another stitch in the book's tapestry of humor, the same as how Six's sidekick is named ‘Pretty-Girl Android Alice’. And this tells me so much about what the author personally values. Playing sexual assault off in this ‘light’ way tells me that he does not regard women as human beings worthy of fundamental rights like personal space and bodily autonomy, so much so that he regards it as standard, default. That their female agency is a comic punchline to delight in stripping away from them. Even if Combatants were funny (it is not; the jokes are barely jokes, simply quirky character aspects and snide remarks from our esteemed protagonist trumpeted loud and large, making it seem like there's a sense of structure and pacing where there is demonstrably not), these things paint such a clear and terrible picture that I could never even consider enjoying it, much less recommending it.

Combatants Will Be Dispatched! is from the author of KONOSUBA, another light novel turned anime series that a lot of people find to be hilarious. I have not read or watched KONOSUBA, but if the worldview on full, awful display in Combatants is still present in that other Isekai parody, I want no part of it. Maybe the jokes are more inventive, or the characters are actually likeable, but like I said before: What's bad here is so bad that I can never open my heart to anything this author does next.

That's the sad fact of it, and after this review is finished this book is going somewhere where I will never have to see, think, contemplate it ever again.