nathandouglasdavis

"You don't scrub with your hands; you scrub with your heart."

The initial color images for each chapter can be quite beautiful, which honestly makes the simplicity and ugliness of the rest of the artwork even more egregious. The body proportions are off and contorted. The coloring is very basic and aesthetically clashing, glaring. It mixes together various styles in a slapdash way and obviously reuses images and pastes photographs. There is also some inconsistency in the layouts of the pages, with some of them devolving into sketchy scribbles or meme-like images. Some of these stylistic shifts at times confused me and made me question whether something was actually happening or if it was some sort of daydream or something. All that said, the artwork does do a pretty good job of looking funny and allowing for some nice visual gags. And the tiered bath set-up is a pretty cool design (even if the clashing styles and inclusion of photographs makes the design look more ugly than not).

There are sections where I felt like this piece of entertainment deserved a 7/10 or an 8/10 rating--often because of its humor--but there are also some lulls and, perhaps most importantly, the last five or six chapters are quite dull and unsatisfying (probably because they started bringing things back to a sobered sense of reality). The entire premise is quite silly and makes for an entertaining read. Yes, there is a recurring theme that putting effort in is worth it (moreso because of the mental satisfaction than any monetary payoff) and that people shouldn't demean any sort of work as being beneath them--and that theme has some value to it--but that theme is often portrayed in absurdist and over-the-top ways (such as the battles). Heo Sae feels like a biting satire of egocentric, fame-seeking people who are more concerned about outward appearances than sincerity and who may have delusions of grandeur, and fe is definitely the best character. I love the selfies. Heo Sae's character arc is quite obvious, but it was still pretty engaging. I liked several of the side characters. I wouldn't have minded seeing some of the relationships explored a bit more, but it was good enough.