SOBER BOB

Sober Bob is a Brisbane based zine creator, specialising in 35mm photography and comic creation. When she isn't McGyvering up her bathroom dark room, she stomps around the city and suburbs, looking for inspiration. Her varying works have been featured in Woolf Pack, Atheist Alliance International, and in shows such as Mint Condition and Hanging Affair. All of this is made possible by her wonderful engineer, without whom she would be an idiot fiddling around in the dark.

All-Stars is Sober's second appearance in PASTEL.

Now here's a Sober Spoiler: To the surprise of PASPals everywhere, Sober Bob isn't your birth name. Blowing the lid off this open secret, how did this alter ego come about?

Originally, the name came about as an advertising campaign in the Northern Territory; when you’re high, have someone around who can tell you to pull your bloody head in. My Sober Bob was a bird I saw when I was high on LSD. Very fun.

In your first appearance in Issue Two, you mentioned zip-tying LED's together in the pitch-black to develop your photos. How does this D-I-Y, Anne-of-all-Trades approach elevate your art?

Having that D-I-Y approach – which has come from my work in zines – has taken my art a bit further than what other people do; a lot of people think “I need to buy all this stuff to make art”, or “I need to be professional and proper” – their set-up takes so long that they struggle to get their art out there. I will make a zine in the morning, have it printed out, and ready to distribute in the afternoon. I don’t like this idea that I have to wait, edit, and constantly think about things. If you have a message, get it out there!

As a photographer, you're a star (some might say an All-Star), but as a zine creator and publisher, you're locally renown on the scene for the work you do. How did you fall into zine culture?

I started out after being fired unfairly from a job; it was frustrating because Fair Work didn’t help me out very much. So I got into activism, and through getting a little pent up, I discovered Visible Ink in Fortitude Valley offers free printing, and I went ham. I made stuff over again, and people got really into it.

If PASPals missed are hungry to sink their teeth into your wok, a little bird's let us in on another open secret: you've constructed a literal, vending ‘zine machine’ for small-scale prints.

Yeah! It’s a vending machine I bought out of the back of a bar in the Valley , once used to stock cigarettes.

And seeing things being so expensive these days, nothing was being sold, s0 I wheeled it out, filled it up with zines, and drilled new holes for locks, ready to make lots of money out of it...

As a creator who’s been on the scene for some time, what kind of relevance do you believe zines have in Brisbane’s arts landscape?

Zines are important in the way that they help people to document their art, almost as a portfolio. It’s super important that people have publishing methods that don’t require any oversight from publishers who are concerned with having a certain message, or making a certain point. I’m like, “Nah, I want my brand front and centre, I don’t want to deal with your advertising getting in my way. This is all me.”

PASPurchase a zine or five from Sober’s zine machine at Paper Snax Zine Hub, located in South Brisbane, and tune in to Bob’s digital radio show ‘Barely Functional with Sober Bob’ for an insight into small print media and street press, available on demand at 4ZZZ.org.au!