Chasing The Dream

Many years ago a good friend of mine asked me “Dave, what do you want to be when you grow up?” After only a few moments I replied to him “Al, I want to be a comic book artist.” Ten years on and here I am chasing the dream with Local Act Comics.

From the outset I knew this would be a hard road. From the veteran’s warnings of lost money to store owners giving the sideways glance with a disinterested “Australian stuff doesn’t sell here…” yet here we are, still pushing on.

Set your goals and strive to achieve them!

It may sound lame but that statement has pushed me in those late, late hours when my hands were too cold to hold a pencil. I have set a goal for LAC to raise the profile and awareness of the Aussie comics scene, and so far things are looking up. We have a really great group of creators associated with LAC, who are dedicated to pushing the boundaries and making a difference. Of course we’ve had our setbacks. From printers running a month behind to a disheartening lack of enthusiasm when LAC first rolled out asking for contributors to our first anthology, ‘LAC Presents…’. I think Graeme McDonald says it best in his summary of his experience in comics “navigating my way between those who said they could and those that actually did.”

It's an often unfortunate outcome with Australian comics that everyday life has to come before the ‘hobby’. I guess I made the decision along the way that, for me, comics was going to be part of everyday life. As with anything in life the inclusion of one thing often means the exclusion of another and as far as I’m aware nobody has managed to squeeze any more hours in each day, so we must be content with the fact that only so many words and lines can be scribed in 24 hours and that we are not supermen and women.

Often it seems that it is only with the support of those around us that we are able to make a dream such as this one a reality.