I Never Liked You: A Comic-Strip Narrative

AUTHOR: Brown, Chester

ARTIST: Chester Brown (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Drawn and Quarterly

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1991-1993

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1994

Publication History

I Never Liked You was originally serialized in issues 26-30 (October, 1991, to April, 1993) of Chester Brown’s comic book Yummy Fur under the title F----.Yummy Fur began as a self-published minicomic in 1983 and was picked up by Toronto-based Vortex Comics in 1986. The series later transitioned to Montreal-based Drawn and Quarterly beginning with issue 25. While early issues included an eclectic mix of shorter, humorous pieces along with regular installments of the surreal Ed the Happy Clown (1989) and the biblical adaptation The Gospel of Mark (1987), Yummy Fur eventually became an outlet for Brown’s autobiographical work, a volume of which was published as The Playboy by Drawn and Quarterly in 1992.

I Never Liked You was first collected under that title in hardcover and paperback editions published by Drawn and Quarterly in 1994. The first edition maintained the series’ original black backgrounds, but the book was reformatted with white backgrounds for a second Drawn and Quarterly paperback edition in 2002. Known as “The New Definitive Edition,” the second edition also incorporates an important cover image into the narrative proper and includes two pages of endnotes, providing context for both the story and its production. A third and similar paperback edition was published by Drawn and Quarterly in 2007.

Plot

Set in the Montreal suburb of Châteauguay in the mid-1970’s, I Never Liked You is an autobiographical story from Brown’s teenage years, focusing especially on his relationships with his mother and a number of neighborhood girls. A prologue set in 1969, when Brown was nine years old, sets the impressionistic and understated narrative in motion by introducing both Connie, the older of two girls living across the street, and Brown’s mother, who chastises him for swearing. The story then skips a few years ahead and introduces Carrie, Connie’s younger sister, who has an obvious crush on Brown but does not act on it. Because of the sparse narrative and dispassionate authorial voice of the novel, Brown’s own feelings are at first difficult to determine. He spends time with Connie and Carrie as well as another girl, Sky. Brown eventually develops a crush on Sky, and a few scenes demonstrate his initial inability to communicate his feelings to her. When he finally does, she reacts positively, but Brown subsequently withdraws, seemingly unable to develop their relationship. Making up excuses for not spending time with her, he finally rejects her outright in favor of listening to the new Kiss record.

Meanwhile, Carrie’s crush continues. However, when she hears about Brown’s declaration to Sky, she attacks him in a fit of anger and screams the words that give the book its title. Connie remains an enigmatic figure, and her relationship with Brown is never defined. He admits to not liking her much, except when the two form a team and play hide-and-seek in the fields with the other neighborhood children. At school, Brown is constantly teased for his refusal to use swear words, and the other children’s numerous attempts to trick him into swearing become a running gag.

A second important plot strand concerns Brown’s relationship with his mother, who is suffering from schizophrenia. Her relatively few appearances in the story are clearly of intense emotional importance to Brown and include such instances as her attempt to talk to her two teenage sons about the female body and Brown’s refusal to run a small errand for her because he would rather watch television. She commits herself to a hospital near the end of the story. When the family visits, Brown fails at his attempt to tell her he loves her, despite having practiced on the way to the hospital. She dies shortly after, and Brown tries to cry but can only force a single tear to come.

Characters

•Chester Brown, the autobiographical protagonist, is a skinny, long-haired teenage boy living in the Montreal suburb of Châteauguay, Quebec, during the 1970’s. He is quiet and emotionally reserved and relates awkwardly to the other characters. His relationship with his mother is particularly strained, and he is unable to show her any affection. His refusal to use swear words stems from his religious upbringing.

•Chester Brown’s mother is devoutly religious and suffers from schizophrenia. She looks older than she is and is insecure in her relationship with Brown. She often talks to her two sons about matters that embarrass them, but it is clear that she craves their affection. At the end of the story, she checks herself into a hospital for treatment, but she dies there shortly afterward.

•Connie is the older of two girls living across the street. She is one year younger than Brown and has a somewhat bossy demeanor. Her relationship with Brown remains unclear, but they often spend time together despite having little to talk about.

•Carrie is Connie’s younger sister. She is two years younger than Brown and has an unspoken yet obvious crush on him that is not reciprocated. Her many attempts to win his affection are unsuccessful, and she finally attacks him in a fit of rage after she hears that he has confessed his love to Sky. She has a boyfriend at the end of the story.

•Sky is a girl who lives next door. She is two years younger than Brown and in the same grade as his brother, Gordon. She stands out from the other girls because of her large breasts and dark hair, and Brown masturbates while thinking about her. She often sits next to Brown in the library. She returns his declaration of love but grows impatient when he is unable to act on it.

Artistic Style

I Never Liked You is drawn in a minimalist style, exhibiting an extraordinary sense of restraint. The pared-down visuals are a natural development from Brown’s earlier autobiographical work in The Playboy, which itself is a departure from his earlier, more cartoonlike and detailed work in Ed the Happy Clown. Despite being fully formed and highly proficient on a technical level, the evocative black-and-white drawings often resemble sketches drawn from an incomplete recollection, an approach that underscores the narrative’s highly personal involvement with childhood memory.

Brown’s quavering and fragile lines cause characters to seem small, insecure, and insignificant, none more so than Brown himself. While the backgrounds are highly naturalistic, characters are most often drawn as exceedingly thin and depicted with large heads and blank stares, adding to the overall evacuation of emotional investment. An exception is the voluptuous Sky, whose curvy appearance adds gravity to her presence and underlines her prominence in Brown’s memories. The skilled use of contrast and large areas of negative space gives the book an ephemeral feel that fits perfectly with the impressionistic and sparse narrative.

Brown is known for his inventive use of irregularly spaced panels and for his untraditional way of arranging them on the page. While most single images are of a similar size, the number on each page varies greatly, from one to as many as seven or eight. Brown drew each panel on a separate piece of paper and assembled the pages afterward, a technique that allows for great flexibility with pacing and gives each image the potential for heightened significance depending on where it is placed.

Themes

The main theme of I Never Liked You is Brown’s inability to form personal relationships in his teenage years. An uncommunicative and emotionally reticent boy, Brown finds it impossible to relate to both his peers and his mother, and the book is tinged with a sense of Brown’s regret at having failed at both. The scene in which Brown visits his mother in the hospital is especially powerful, as he practices telling her he loves her, imagining the healing effect of his words, only to fail at the last minute.

Speech itself appears as a secondary theme and is evident in both the imagined significance of declarations of love and affection and Brown’s refusal to swear. It is suggested that his religious upbringing might have influenced his inability to communicate strong feelings to the people in his life. The book’s preoccupation with the confused verbal silences of adolescence is mirrored in the many blank visual spaces, which often isolate characters physically from the rest of the narrative and depict them as dwarfed by their surroundings.

The difficulty of communicating through the means of language is underscored by a sequence in which Brown draws an image of a skeleton reaching for a bird as a present for Sky. In this image, the bird represents Sky and the skeleton Brown. He is perfectly articulate when describing its meaning to himself, but when questioned by Sky, he denies that it carries any special significance and later claims never to use symbolism. Only through art can Brown express himself, and, thus, I Never Liked You documents an important step in his realization of artistic purpose and also serves as a belated attempt to communicate with those he feels he has let down, including his adolescent self.

Impact

I Never Liked You, along with its predecessor The Playboy, was part of a late 1980’s and early 1990’s surge in autobiographical comics. Inspired by the 1960’s and 1970’s underground artists Robert Crumb, Harvey Pekar, and Justin Green and frequently emerging from 1980’s “zine” culture, artists such as Joe Matt, Seth, Julie Doucet, Lynda Barry, and Mary Fleener began depicting events from their pasts and daily lives in quotidian and often uncomfortable detail. Dedicated to factual and emotional truth, artists such as Brown and Matt became known for their unflattering self-portraits as pornography and masturbation addicts, and the simple aesthetic of the black-and-white images was often seen as underscoring the authenticity of the work and lending credibility to the project of exposing the artists’ most private sides. This convenient but facile and superficial analysis belies the fact that many of these stories are in fact artfully crafted narratives drawn in a highly sophisticated visual style, as is the case with I Never Liked You.

Brown’s shift to autobiography was brought about by his interest in the work of Matt and Doucet, while his pared-down style was influenced by the simple and slightly old-fashioned style of Seth. In the years since the publication of I Never Liked You, autobiography has become one of the most lasting and artistically fertile genres in the world of comics. Artists such as Jeffrey Brown and Ariel Schrag continue the project of documenting painful personal history in a sparse visual style, while Anders Nilsen’s masterful use of negative space is indebted to the absences and large empty spaces of I Never Liked You.

Further Reading

Brown, Jeffrey. Funny Misshapen Body (2009).

Matt, Joe. Fair Weather (2002).

Schrag, Ariel. Potential (2000).

Bibliography

Daly, Mark, and Rich Kreiner. “Seth, Brown, Matt.” The Comics Journal 162 (1993): 51-56.

Grammel, Scott. “Chester Brown: From the Sacred to the Scatological.” The Comics Journal 135 (1990): 66-90.

Hatfield, Charles. “The Autobiographical Stories in Yummy Fur.” The Comics Journal 210 (1999): 67.

Juno, Andrea. “Chester Brown.” In Dangerous Drawings: Interviews with Comix and Graphix Artists. New York: Juno Books, 1997.

Levin, Bob. “Good Ol’ Chester Brown: A Psycho-Literary Exploration of Yummy Fur.” The Comics Journal 162 (1993): 45-49.

Wolk, Douglas. “Chester Brown: The Outsider.” In Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. New York: Da Capo Press, 2007.