Glass Mask Vol. 1-3
A story about a young girl and her dream to become an actress. Maya is a girl with low self-esteem and a poor background but she was born with a talent to tell tales by impersonating other characters.
This is caught on by Chigusa Tsukikage, an old actress that is trying to extend her existence into immortality by hand-raising the perfect actress to re-do her old role in "The Crimson Goddess".
Tsukikage takes advantage of Maya issues with her mother and her own self-esteem to take Maya under her wing, while her actions are ultimately helping Maya reach her dream, they are selfish actions with the goal of furthering her own ego.
The series paints Maya as an underdog in her rivalry with Ayumi, talent girl and daughter of a famous actress and a director, but despite the difference between the two, Maya is herself an extremely talented person able to perform at a high level despite her lack of experience.
Despite her talent, Maya does push herself to her limits to be able to understand or create a character, be it by living as a character for an entire week, or literally pushing herself to near death so she can understand what it is like to be in that position. Often times Tsukikage herself is the one to push Maya for such actions, not being afraid of abusing Maya for he to be able to grow as an actress.
The side-characters also add to the story, nearly everyone has their own motivation and goals and aren't afraid of taking measures to achieve their goals, there's a bigger world than just Maya dream of becoming an actress and the series manage to make that clear via it's side-characters.
The art itself is pleasant to the eye, very shoujo with some hints of Astroboy/Disney in some of the ligther scenes. With that said the panels can be a bit hard to follow at times, and so far that would be my biggest issue with the series.
The best thing I can say about the series is that I got lost reading it for hours, and despite reading 300-400 pages in a row I was still eager to continue reading and always made sure to carefully read all the lines rather than just skim over the text in a hurry to get to the next part of the story. I simply got lost and absorbed into the story and the characters struggles that I continued to read without realizing how long I had been reading.
