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
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