“Cartooning is a great way to extract the silliness bottled up in my head,” the artist said during the interview. “Humor is subjective so it’s always interesting to read other people’s reactions to my work. I get a wide range of comments from “This is hilarious” to “You think you’re so clever, you’re not!” to “I don’t get it.”
Atkinson joked: “The last one is always my favorite. I usually like to respond “I don’t get it either.”
Bored Panda asked the illustrator to go into detail about what inspired him to draw cartoons about classic books. Here’s what he revealed: “I came across a survey a few years back that revealed about 60 percent of people pretend to have read books they haven’t and around 40 percent rely on movies and TV to feign knowledge of popular books.”
He continued: “I thought it might be a funny idea to help everyone out and provide “tweet-sized” synopses of these famous books suitable for dinner parties or when you’re cornered at a function. They’re not intended to replace reading the actual book and I’m quick to tell students not to use them as book reports unless they want a solid D- or an F.”
Atkinson explained that he’s still posting new cartoons to his blog two times per week. What’s more, he told Bored Panda about his upcoming plans. Next year, he hopes to have a follow-up book to his current one (“Abridged Classics: Brief summaries of books you were supposed to read but probably didn’t”). “The follow-up will most likely cover movies and television and is tentatively titled “Abridged Cinema.”
The artist had some good advice for cartoonists and artists: “Don’t take yourself too seriously and if you’re in it for the money—get out now!"
