Hair plays a very central role in comics, or more specifically manga. The distinguishment of different characters relies heavily on hair designs. Next time you read a comic book try to mentally remove the hair from different characters; very often you would find the faces of different characters are indistinguishable from each other. This also means actually portraiting real individuals (as in political comics) require more effort, for simply changing the hair design would not work.
oh my. she looks awfully familiar!