Dave Coverly admits there is no
overriding theme, no tidy little philosophy that
precisely describes what "Speed Bump" is
about. "Basically," he says, "if life
were a movie, these would be the outtakes."
These "outtakes" now
appear in over 250 newspapers internationally,
including the Washington Post, Toronto Globe &
Mail, Detroit Free Press, Indianapolis Star, Cleveland
Plain Dealer, Cincinnati Enquirer, New Orleans Times-Picayune,
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Vancouver Sun, Baltimore Sun, Rocky
Mountain News, and Arizona Republic. In
2000, the first "Speed Bump" book was
published, Speed Bump: A Collection of Cartoon
Skidmarks (Andrews McMeel). More recent books include
Speed Bump: Cartoons for Idea People (2004, ECW
Press), which was named Humor Book of the Year in
independent publishing by Foreword Magazine, and Just
One %$#@ Speed Bump After Another (2005, ECW Press).
Until recently, American Greetings carried a line of
"Speed Bump" calendars and greeting cards, which are now being carried by Marian Heath.
Coverly grew up in Plainwell,
Michigan, where he was the cartoonist for his high
school paper. He began taking cartooning seriously in
1986 as an undergraduate student at Eastern Michigan
University, where he penned a comic panel called
"Freen" for the school newspaper. He also
studied in England during this time, and returned to
EMU to receive his bachelor's degree in both
philosophy and imaginative writing in 1987. He
continued his cartooning in graduate school at Indiana
University, where his panel won numerous national
awards; he was graduated from IU with a master's in
creative writing in 1992.
While taking a year off from
graduate school, Coverly was an art director for a
public relations firm, and an editorial cartoonist for
the Battle Creek Enquirer. In 1990, he returned to
Indiana and became the editorial cartoonist for The
Herald-Times in Bloomington. His work became regularly
reprinted in such publications as Esquire, Saturday
Evening Post, The New York Times, and USA Today. In
1994, Creators Syndicate picked up his untitled
cartoon panel, helped choose the name "Speed
Bump," and a year later it was running in nearly
100 papers. Coverly left The Herald-Times in 1995 to
concentrate on his syndicated work.
In 1995, and again in 2003,
"Speed Bump" was given the prestigious Best
Newspaper Panel award by the National Cartoonists
Society, an honor for which it was also nominated
again in 1997, 2001, and 2002. In 1998, the same
organization gave him another award for Best Greeting
Cards, which were nominated again in 1999. Coverly has been a finalist for the Reuben Award,
given by the NCS to the Outstanding Cartoonist of the
Year, every year since 2004.
In addition to his syndicated work,
Coverly's cartoons have been published in The New Yorker, and he is also a regular contributing cartoonist to Parade Magazine, and both
of PETA's magazines, Animal Times and Grrr! for
kids.
Coverly now works out of an attic studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is married to Chris, and they have two daughters, Alayna and Simone.