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 Brown's autobiographical work developed from a scene that had been developing since the 1970s and which had reached a peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Brown's open and self-deprecating example left an impact on cartoonists such as Jeffrey Brown and Ariel Schrag, and his sparse layouts on the likes of Anders Nilsen. Upon the serial's conclusion, reviewer Darcy Sullivan called it "a major step forward for the artist, a leading light in adult comics". American cartoonist Gilbert Hernandez hailed The Playboy and I Never Liked You as "probably the best graphic novels next to Maus"; British cartoonist Eddie Campbell called them "the most sensitive comics ever made"; and American comics writer Heidi MacDonald called I Never Liked You "a masterpiece" that is "the equal of any 'coming of age' movie". Charles Hatfield praised Brown's honesty, keen observation, and narrative strength, and called the "hide with me" page as one of his favourites. Critic described the work as "an example of sobriety and