Comic Review: Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O'Connell
I met my first girlfriend in 2012. She was a British girl living in London, and I was a Texan girl who didn't yet understand that a girl was what she was. We met on a Pokemon forum where we were both moderators, and we grew close in the staff Skype chat. I was 17. She was 18. In early December, we admitted we had feelings for each other. She told me she loved me on Christmas, three weeks later. In March of 2013, we had our first big fight. She broke up with me. It lasted three days.
In Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me (hereafter referred to as Laura Dean), writer Mariko Tamaki and artist Rosemary Valero O'Connell explore formative experiences familiar to anyone who has come of age: struggling to maintain friendships, grasping at a greater understanding of the world around you, trying to figure out the way you want to live your life, and that one partner. You know the one. You can't stay together for more than a few weeks at a time, but every time you're apart you're miserable until you kiss and make up. If you've never had that, then I envy you.
The partner in question is the titular Laura Dean, an androgynous queer and the most popular girl in school. Our protagonist is Freddy Riley, Laura's girlfriend, who writes to an online advice column with a problem: Laura Dean keeps breaking up with her. She's done it three times: once when she decided that she was going to go backpacking in Oregon at some point and so they wouldn't be able to keep in touch, once when she decided she liked boys for a bit, and, at the start of the comic, when Laura cheats on Freddy at the school dance and sends her a noncommital text afterward.
And every time, Freddy comes right on back.
I kissed my first girlfriend for the first time in June of 2013. We had met in person for the first time earlier that day. I'd tried to kiss her then, but she pulled away out of embarrassment. We were in Paris. She kissed me on top of the Arc de Triomphe. It was electric. I'd never been kissed before, and I told myself that I was in love. Two days later, my girlfriend was berating me for being too clingy as we toured the Palace of Versailles. A few minutes after that, she fainted, and I carried her over to a bench. She didn't say thank you when she woke up.
I was mostly familiar with Mariko Tamaki from her work on superhero comics: she had a decent run on Detective Comics, she wrote a Supergirl book I have yet to read (it's on my shelf! I'll read it eventually!), and she created the excellent Zatanna: Bring Down the House with Javier Rodriguez. Here, though, I think Tamaki is operating in her wheelhouse: coming-of-age young adult drama with a rainbow tinge.
That Freddy is a lesbian, and that Laura is also gay (so are most of Freddy's friends!), are facts about those characters. Their realtionship is a gay relationship. The fact that they are gay is important to them as characters, but there's a tension wherein the story seems to resist categorization as a "gay story." It is a story about relationships, and that story happens to have gay themes. There's some value in that, I think - gay people are people, after all, these kinds of stories are and should be considered normal, especially as stories with gay themes come under increasing scrutiny amidst a more general right-wing cultural creep.
I came out as a transgender woman in October of 2017. I can't remember if my first girlfriend and I were together at the time or not. For five years, the cycle was consistent. Get back together, honeymoon, fight, breakup. I can't remember what the fights were about. I'm sure I was an asshole sometimes. It was still my first relationship. I'd still only had one frame of reference for how to be a partner to someone. All I can remember are the times she'd put me down, dismiss me, dismiss my interests, act carelessly or thoughtlessly to me. I remember how blase she'd acted towards me coming out. She was bisexual, so nothing had to change, right? But I knew that something did. I wasn't the same anymore. I knew what I was. I was a lesbian woman now. And this relationship that had existed in fits and starts since I was still an unhappy young man increasingly felt like a pair of clothes that no longer fit.
Tamaki is a skilled character writer, which is a boon in a genre like this. Her characters all feel well-rounded and all speak with a unique voice, and they feel well-layered with virtues and flaws. As protagonist, Freddy naturally gets the most focused, and her foibles - especially her neglect of her friends as she gets drawn more and more into Laura's orbit - are developed and explored well. Freddy becomes less and less connected to her friends as her relationship with Laura progresses, and her neglect of her relationships outside of Laura mean that when her best friend becomes pregnant by her dungeon master, she nearly isn't able to be there for them. This kind of love is like a black hole: it sucks you in, and renders you able to focus on little else. Even having stable, lasting friendships becomes difficult once you're consumed.
As a... well, I don't want to say villain. That's a little too dramatic for this kind of story. Antagonist fits, but doesn't feel dramatic enough. Hm. Ah, there's the word. As an abuser, the titular Laura Dean is almost uncomfortably realistically-written. It's easy to write an abusive character as cartoonish or over-the-top. It can even be cathartic to do so. But abuse takes many forms, some more subtle than others, and a lot of the ways that Laura abuses Freddy in this comic rang true in a way that made me queasy: saying she forgives Freddy after a fight for which Laura was in the wrong and for which Freddy never apologized; sulking when Freddy fails to give her attention and then only extending it in kind when it's convenient to her; and the one that made my stomach drop: using an impulsive mistake Freddy makes to make her own transgressions seem minor and draw Freddy further under her control by saying that "no matter what, we'll always come back to each other."
It made me remember when those words were said to me.
I broke up with my first girlfriend for the last time in March of 2018. It was over Skype video call. The full-circle nature of it all was unintentional on my part. I couldn't do it in person, so I felt that Skype was the closest I could get to giving her the courtesy the act deserved. She was sobbing. She wanted to keep trying to make it work, she said. She wanted to marry me and have my babies, she said. She loved me, she said. I didn't feel anything anymore. Maybe I never had, not really. The week before, she'd implied I was a pedophile for reblogging a picture of an anime girl. I had been talking to a girl who would give me my first lesbian heartbreak later that spring. Two months after that, I would be messaged out of the blue by a girl who isn't a girl anymore. With them I would fall in love, real love, for the first time. Today they are my best friend.
I've spoken a good amount about the writing in this book, and not enough about the composition and artwork, so let's fix that.
Rosemary Valero-O'Connell is not a name I was familiar with, and her mainstream comics work is pretty thin on the ground, but I grew to really appreciate her style in Laura Dean. Her characters are cartoony and expressive while remaining grounded in a realistic physicality. I will need to track down a copy of her own comic Don't Go Without Me, which looks even more interesting and artistic.
I want to draw attention, as well, to Valero-O'Connell's coloring and lettering. The former is effective in its restraint: the book's palette is limited to black, white, grey, and pink, the last of which is used as an accent color or to draw attention to a particular element of a panel.
Meanwhile, the tails of the book's word balloons snake and loop throughout the panels, helping to set the pace of the book's many scenes of conversation between characters, making them more engaging to read. It's a really effective example of how good lettering can enhance an otherwise mundane scene and make it more entertaining to read.
A weakness of art in a lot of standalone indie comics, and especially those illustrated by lesser-known artists, is overly-orthodox - or worse, boring - panel layouts and page composition. It's death by a thousand nine-panel grids. Happily, Laura Dean does not suffer from this malady. Valero-O'Connell's layouts are varied and creative, and in particular she makes great use of the book's limited color palette to guide the reader's eye or use negative space effectively, such as below:
A few years ago, I reconnected with my first girlfriend. She was living on the southern English coast with her boyfriend. It went okay, at first. We chatted. Caught up. But then she said something, one of those little, dismissive, thoughtless things she always used to say, and the thought crossed my mind: the kind of person you are is not the kind of person that fits in my life anymore. I blocked her. I haven't spoken to her since. May you do the same to your own Laura Dean one day. In solidarity with all my lesbian sisters in love and loss.
If young adult fiction wets your whistle - and certainly the audience for it is large - then Laura Dean is for you. If you like messy gay relationship drama, you'll find something here to satisfy you. If you like creative and appealing comic art, this book is worth a look. It's a worthwhile read - even if it doesn't hit as close to home for you as it did for me.
FINAL SCORE: 4/5. A VERY GOOD COMIC.
