Style
The book is told in "scenes... out of nowhere as a dreamlike series of pulses". Little setup or context is given to each scene in the book. "The effect is sometimes eerie, as here, despite the grounding of the story in mundane everyday stuff."
Unlike Brown's previous graphic novel, The Playboy, he makes limited use of a narrator or narrator's voice in I Never Liked You. The story is told almost entirely through its pictures and sparse dialogue. The page layouts are sparse, sometimes limited to a single, small panel on a page. In the original serialization and first collected edition in 1994, the panels were placed on black backgrounds. Brown made the black backgrounds white in the 2002 edition.
The artwork is drawn using a brush, and is amongst the simplest and sparsest in Brown's body of work. Nonetheless, there is quite a bit of hatching in the art. Brown had been paring down his style starting with the Playboy stories. He wasn't happy with his style, and was trying "to rebuild style in a way that would like," which he continued with I Never Liked You, where he was "trying to get even more pared down than The Playboy."
Read more about this topic: I Never Liked You
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“As the style of Faulkner grew out of his rage—out of the impotence of his rage—the style of Hemingway grew out of the depth and nuance of his disenchantment.”
—Wright Morris (b. 1910)
“To translate, one must have a style of his own, for otherwise the translation will have no rhythm or nuance, which come from the process of artistically thinking through and molding the sentences; they cannot be reconstituted by piecemeal imitation. The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one’s own style and creatively adjust this to one’s author.”
—Paul Goodman (1911–1972)