You are reading The Man Who Cleans Up Makeup chapter 42 at MangaHere today. Today’s comic is called “The Big Hunk of Secrets.” In this one-shot, Davis has us following the career of the man who cleans up makeup. Davis does a good job of describing the various products and items used by the main character and gives a good description of the typical makeup application. He also gives an adequate amount of description for each product, but does leave it a little vague to leave the reader with just a vague idea of what the product does.
The story starts off as a typical funny college student goes to the local pharmacy to pick up some random “stall mouth,” but ends up getting some “stinkin’ stinky” (depending on the dialect, it may mean something different). He heads home, rinses his mouth, and goes to the local bar to buy some more “stall mouth,” and finds that his wallet was empty. He heads back to the pharmacy and throws away the “stinkin’ stinks.” Afterward, he meets the local genius makeup artist, Cheon Young-Jung, who happens to know all about how to clean up makeup and has been studying the art. Together, they come up with a plan to get the man who cleans up makeup to tell the full story of his life.
I really liked the part where the man who cleans up makeup realizes he’s been keeping something in his shirt pocket all the time. This turns out to be a reference to his past obsession with the martial arts, and the way that the story evolved (basically a guy kept doing martial arts and was trying to get the headmasters to ban it because it made him “more powerful and faster”), made the transition to webtoons easier for me. And I also like how the comic strips played a large role here as well. There were a lot of strip-style pictures that I found very amusing.
One thing I didn’t think too much of while reading this book was the repeated references to how bad the martial arts are. Sure, the guy is very protective of his face, but what about his real body?
Isn’t he supposed to be protecting everyone around him from all the germs and contaminants that he brings in when he cleans up his face with his webtoon?
In the Spotlight
In one scene, he even makes a point of telling Taz, “If you put on this mask, your face is probably contaminated.” And then he proceeds to use the sanitizer and the mask and sneezes and puts his mask back on to go on another date.
There was also a lot of sexual innuendo in this book. When the Webtoon artist first starts making out with Taz, the comic strip literally shows Taz giving Cosmo a blow job. It’s not a huge deal at first, but when Cosmo later catches his reflection in the mirror while scrubbing the “cunt” that is on Taz’s face, he realises what he’s done and calls his girlfriend over to his place to find out what happened.
Overall, this Webtoon series is my favourite Webtoonanga that I’ve read. It’s very light-hearted, with the characters bumbling around and having hilarious conflicts that keep you laughing till your head spins. It’s a great example of how anime can draw you into a fantasy of overcoming life’s little challenges and that life is really just meaningless, but this guy seems to have enough faith in himself to not give up until the very end. I would recommend ManwhocleansupMakeupMan to anyone who likes a light-hearted, yet epic story about manliness.