Dave Coverly

Dave Coverly, a native of Plainwell, Michigan, is the creator of the cartoon panel “Speed Bump”, which appears internationally in hundreds of publications, including The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Detroit Free Press. His work was named “Best in Newspaper Panels” by the National Cartoonists Society in 1995, 2003, 2014 and 2021. In 2009 the same organization gave him its highest honor, the Reuben Award, for “Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year”.

Coverly’s cartoons have also appeared in The New Yorker, USA Today, The New York Times, Newsweek and were a regular feature in Parade. He is also the principal cartoonist for BarkBox and regularly donates cartoons to charitable organizations that focus on dogs and cats. There are numerous book collections of Coverly’s cartoons, most notably Dogs Are People, Too (Macmillan). He is also the author and/or illustrator of numerous children’s books, including The Very Inappropriate Word (Macmillan/with Jim Tobin). His chapter book series began with Night of the Living Worms: The Misadventures of Speed Bump & Slingshot, and continued with Night of the Living Shadows, and Night of the Living Zombie Bugs (Macmillan).

My Support Dog Ate My Comfort Food (Andrews McMeel/Simon & Schuster), a collection of his more recent dog cartoons, will be released in October, 2026. Coverly earned his BS with a double major in Imaginative Writing and Philosophy at Eastern Michigan University in 1987 and received his MA in Creative Writing from Indiana University in 1993. In 2011 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts by EMU. He has two adult daughters, Alayna and Simone, and lives with his wife, Chris in Ann Arbor, Michigan.