Art & Creativity Quote by Chester Brown

Cartoonists rarely get to be this blunt about their own work, and Chester Brown’s plainspoken self-assessment is doing more than ranking a favorite. “I Never Liked You” is his admission that craft, not autobiography, is the real measuring stick. He’s not claiming it’s his most important book or his most personal; he’s praising how it “works,” like a machine you can stress-test. That language matters. Brown is a formalist hiding in confessional clothing, and this quote quietly demystifies the romantic idea that sincerity alone makes a comic land.

The split he names - “as a story” and “the drawing” - is the tightrope of alternative comics in the 1990s, when Brown helped define a style of emotional minimalism: clean lines, withheld reactions, silence doing the heavy lifting. Saying it “works on both levels” signals a rare alignment between content and form. The subtext is that many books don’t achieve that. Some are well-written but visually inert; others are graphically striking but narratively thin. Brown is proud because this one closes the gap.

There’s also a defensive modesty embedded in “for me at least.” It acknowledges how taste, especially in comics, is bound up with rhythm and restraint - the particular way panels pace discomfort, the way a face refuses to emote, the way memory becomes design. Brown isn’t asking for consensus. He’s staking out an ethos: the best work isn’t the loudest or most likable. It’s the piece where the story’s emotional friction is matched by a drawing style disciplined enough not to smooth it over.