By Kirin Xin — When it comes to designing characters, especially young adults and teens, for modern-day settings, there’s a certain amount of finesse required to pull them off. Too often in comics, movies, television, young characters feel out of place. Plot-wise they’re in high school, but stylistically they talk like thirty year olds and dress like ten year olds in the 90s. These kid-type caricatures not only fall flat within the story, but also create dissonance between the designs and actual young readers who can’t relate to them.

However, for every ten of these off-kilter characters, there’s one book that pulls them off with the grace to make even the most picky of teens feel warm and cozy in their representation. Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me is one such book.

Written by Eisner-winning Mariko Tamaki and illustrated by the incomparable Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, Laura Dean follows the story of Freddy, a high school-aged girl and her romantic woes centered around the titular character, the infamous Laura Dean. The book is not only a craft of visual excellence, but also deals with heavy topics such as manipulation and toxic relationships in a way that is easily digestible for young readers. It looks at teens and their struggles in a touchingly honest way not enough stories do. The resulting comic is one that will hold onto you longer than it ever has to.

Part of what makes Laura Dean such a success is its aforementioned depiction of teens and young adults. Of course, it’s not absolutely integral for a book to have a perfectly designed main character. Take Gwen Stacy from the Spiderverse comics for example. While her chest-length cut, black headband-wearing hairstyle isn’t exactly in touch with how modern youth look, it’s still an iconic throwback to her origin in the 1960s. However, there is a reason why her redesign for the 2018 movie Into the Spiderverse resonated with so many. It looks like an actual teen living in the 2000s.

The same concept is exactly why the teens in Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me feel so familiar. From DnD-inspired dragon t-shirts, trendy round glasses, and Doc Martens to aesthetic jewelry, cute patterned dresses, and sheer kimono shrugs, everything feels and looks like things current young adults would actually wear. Remember that girl from high school who wore boots with her prom dress because that was cool? She’s in there, represented by the main character, Freddy. As seen even early on in her concept art, Freddy has a unique style of her own. And it all, from the tucked tees to the ripped boyfriend jeans to the bags and boots, is something you would find in the closet of a modern teen.

However, it is also very different from the clothing of her love interest, Laura Dean. Laura’s style is less ‘cute,’ more ‘effortlessly cool’ and is still as stylish and relevant as it is distinctive to her character.

And that type of balance is what catapults Tamaki and Valero-O’Connell’s designs from good to great.

Supposing that you want your characters to be well-rounded individuals, each of them has to have their own style. Just like in real life, no two people dress exactly the same all the time, even within a friend group. And Laura Dean captures this effortlessly. There’s the main character that can be as casual as she can be cute. There’s her friend who radiates ‘the fashionable gay’ energy. The DnD one, the cool older kid, the casual friend, they are all easily distinguishable as what type of person they are solely from their looks alone. And this extends beyond clothes. The characters themselves are distinctive. There’s different hairstyles. Not just ‘one has hair down, one is in a ponytail,’ but hair of different types, textures, colors, constantly changing. Different body types. Different ethnicities without having ‘token’ characters. All filled out with the solid personalities to feel relatable without being gauche. This is evident immediately at the start of the book, as Freddy is attending a dance with her friends. Each is dressed in their own unique way, but clearly fit together as a group. From the few short panels, it’s easy to get a sense of each person’s personal style and theme.

However, as any good character designer knows, characters are more than their looks. While appearances are important to draw readers in, personality is what makes them stay. They are an attitude, exuded as much in their words as their design. And in Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, Mariko Tamaki manages to capture this attitude effortlessly in the characters’ dialogue. Between their lamentations of overdramatized teen romance that toe the line between cringy and relatable, you’ll find bits of trendy phrases that make the characters feel ‘real.’ The character Buddy proclaims ‘For the gods!’ in true gay fashion. His friend Doodle talks in that noticeable way kids raised by older guardians do. Memespeak, sarcasm, poetic angst. It all builds them into fully fleshed-out designs that teens can not only see, but hear themselves in.

But despite their interesting qualities, looks, and speech patterns, one thing that can truly make or break a character’s believability is their interaction with their environment. I don’t know a single young person whose room is without any personal touches, and it’s likely you don’t either. So when a character doesn’t have any in their immediate space, whether that be a backpack on the floor, a pencil on the desk, or posters littering the wall, it can devoid a space of details that really drives that person’s presence in it home. However, in Laura Dean, not only are these details present, they are effervescent in how they contribute to the reader’s understanding of the characters, the most clear being Freddy’s room.

While at its core it’s simply messy, it also serves as insight to her character, her hobbies, her interests, her tastes. All things we may not have had time to explore in the story otherwise. It’s indirect development, and it follows suit in the spatial details of every setting in the book. A trendy phone case, embellishments on a bag, a messy room with clear personal touches, the environments are everything. And they only benefit the characters’ immediate designs without distracting from them.

However, for all the smart clothing choices, fluidity of speech, and careful attention to detail, there is one thing above all else that makes Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me a master class in young adult and teen character design. And that is the care with which Tamaki and Valero-O’Connell handle their characters. Comics are made for a variety of reasons. But no matter their purpose, one of the main things that they do is touch those who connect with them. One badly-created character can, for their cute looks, funny wit, and sparkling personality, leave a reader wanting for something if they are written without a soul. Being honest with a reader about a character requires care. Whether that means exposing their most problematic emotions as raw fodder for self discovery, or depicting queerness as a fact, not some big dramatic event, as Tamaki and Valero-O’Connell do with Freddy, the way a character’s design is handled is what can really endear them to a person for life.

And without a doubt, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me is a book that will do just that for generations current and to come.

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Kirin Xin is a graphic designer, band freak, and comics writer and illustrator working out of the Midwest. They could have been prom king but devoted their life to making comic books. They can be found at kirixin.com or on social media @kirixin