Academic Charles Hatfield finds "an abiding interest in the ways people are shaped by their environment" in Brown's autobiographical work, and believes the stories demonstrate "the urgency of
Justin Green and the mundane particularity of
Harvey Pekar", two influential creators known for their revealing autobiographical comics. Brown is unsparing in his depictions of social awkwardness of his teenage years. Despite the 1970s adolescent backdrop, sex and drugs are absent; his life is shaped by his strictly religious parents and introversion. . Brown's mother (1923–76) had schizophrenia. This is not made explicit, but hinted at in scenes where she approaches awkward subjects with Chet and his brother Gord; the boys' unsupportive responses feed the discomfort. Brown addresses his mother's mental health in his 1995 cartoon essay "
My Mom Was a Schizophrenic", in which he takes an
anti-psychiatric stance. Chet's face is near expressionless throughout. The characters are distanced from the reader, inviting neither empathy nor
identification. To cartoonist and critic Pepo Pérez, this is a challenge to readers to understand the characters. In the appendix to the "New Definitive Edition", Brown declares the dialogue is filtered through his memory and likely did not occur as recorded, and that locations and other details are also subject to lapses of memory. To academic Elisabeth El Refaie this transparency on Brown's part is "a deeper and more sincere form of authenticity". Reviewer C. Max Magee found the tone of awkwardness and emotional emptiness comparable to works by contemporaries such as
Daniel Clowes and
Chris Ware. The story unfolds in vignettes, with little setup or context given to any scene. To Hatfield, they "[pop] out of nowhere as a dreamlike series of pulses ... The effect is sometimes eerie ... despite the grounding of the story in mundane everyday stuff." Unlike in his previous graphic novel,
The Playboy, Brown makes limited use of a narrator in
I Never Liked You. The story is told almost entirely through its pictures and sparse dialogue. The page layouts are also sparse, sometimes limited to a single, small panel on a page, sometimes up to seven or eight. The layout and repetition of panels affects pacing, slowing or quickening scene. Brown abandoned the grid layout he had used in earlier works for more varied, organic layouts. Backgrounds establish the mood of a scene, harmonizing or contrasting with the action—as when Chet and Connie return from the movies amongst a romantic snow-covered, starry landscape, against an awkward silence accentuated by panel that grow, making the figures appear ever more insignificant. The cartooning is far looser than in Brown's earlier work, and concerned more with gesture and expression than literal detail. They are rendered with a brush, and amongst the simplest and sparsest in his body of work. There is nonetheless a significant amount of
hatching, and the backgrounds are naturalistic, in contrast to the thin, distorted figures. Brown had been paring his artwork since the
Playboy stories, as he was not happy with his style and sought "to rebuild style in a way that would like". He continued this with
I Never Liked You, where he has said he was "trying to get even more pared down than
The Playboy". Certain inanimate objects receive a focus imbuing them with special significance, such as Chet's habitual after-school package of soda crackers or the Brown family home—a house that, to reviewer Darcy Sullivan, "is as much a character as in
The Playboy". Brown drew the pictures before laying down the panel borders, which conform to the shapes of the pictures they enclosed and are drawn in a wobbly free-hand much like in the artwork of the
Los Bros Hernandez or
Robert Crumb. He drew each panel individually, assembling them into pages afterwards. In the original serialization and first collected edition, they were placed on black backgrounds. He changed to white backgrounds for the 2002 edition. ==Reception and legacy==