Bored Panda got in touch with Coverly to learn more about how he became a cartoonist and his creative process. "Like most kids, I loved cartoons. But as much as I enjoyed the drawings, what really attracted me to cartooning as a kid were the ideas and the utter surprise of an unexpected twist," the artist told us. "I loved that an artist could create a normal, familiar situation and then turn it all upside down to make a reader see that situation in a whole new way. So for me, it was more about the writing, while the drawing served as the form of visualizing that funny idea. I was self-taught and worked hard on the drawing part of the art form, though, doing cartoons for my high school and college papers.
My dream was to get these single-panel cartoons syndicated because this was pre-internet and that was the only way to find a readership. For 8 years I received rejection letter after rejection letter, until finally, in 1994, I was offered a contract by Creators Syndicate, I chose the name Speed Bump, and papers across the country started running my work. It was very much my dream since childhood."
We asked the artist if he has any specific sources of inspiration or routines that help him brainstorm new comic ideas. He shared that he gets inspiration from lots and lots of reading. "The two most important things to me are: the ideas should try to be relevant to the experiences we all have in common, and the ideas should be *about* something. I do make jokes sometimes just for a joke's sake, but the cartoons that really excite me are the ones that are both humorous and have something to say. I think the relevance and the thoughtfulness in a successful panel are what make certain cartoons more relatable. As Mark Twain said, 'There's a kernel of truth in every jest,' and I think that's so good to keep in mind when writing observational humor.
Routines and structure are also counter-intuitively very important to creativity, at least to mine. I have a futon in my attic studio where I always sit to read and think of ideas, so when I'm sitting there I'm automatically in work mode. It's that crucial brain-butt connection!"
According to Coverly, staying motivated isn't much of a challenge for him. "Honestly, because I'm still obsessed with that flint spark of a moment when two separate bits of subjective matter merge into something brand new. I'll always love that discovery. What also keeps me motivated is that creating a cartoon is a shared experience - when I have an idea my hope is that readers can relate to that idea and also bring their own perspective to it. It's such a lovely connection, and one of my favorite things is hearing from people when that's happened."
No matter how enjoyable the creative process is, the artist told us that it isn't always easy to be a cartoonist. "I have to turn in 7 cartoons every week so I live in the shadow of a looming deadline. The most challenging thing about 'being funny' for a living is that life isn't always funny. A bad day or a sad day really makes it difficult to find anything humorous to write about. So another big part of this job is compartmentalizing and setting aside the external world to concentrate on your internal world. Sometimes you don't feel funny but you have to at least remember what funny feels like, if that makes sense."
