The Comics Bureau

I have on occa­sion been described, or accused of being a pen fet­ish­ist. This is prob­ably true, so as a new year’s gift to every­one, I decided to write up a post about some of the pens that I use. This is by no means an exhaust­ive list, but gives a brief glimpse into the life of a pen fetishist.

Brush Pens;

I love draw­ing with brush pens, and there is a really wide range of pens avail­able, with vary­ing levels of qual­ity. I’ll go through the pens in the chro­no­lo­gical order in which I was intro­duced to them. First up;

My first expos­ure to brush pens was the Zig Graphic Twin, which has a rub­ber tip at one end and a reg­u­lar felt tip at the other. As I remem­ber it, the ink was pretty vicious — if you got it onto your fin­gers, you would have to wait for that layer of skin to die. I’m not sure if I’m a bit too heavy handed, but I used to snap the nibs of these pens all the time. They did come in a nice vari­ety of col­ours though, but they weren’t great for draw­ing with.

After real­ising that this wasn’t a great pen, I moved on to the Kur­etake Zig Brush Writer II

This was the first brush pen I used that had bristles. In ret­ro­spect, the syn­thetic bristles now feel like tooth­brush bristles — not much fun to draw with. You do get a lot of con­trol over the ink flow though due to the squeezy refil­lable body of the pen though.

After that, I moved on to the Pen­tel Brush Pen.

The Pen­tel Brush Pen is a really great pen — a really good intro­duc­tion to the world of pen fet­ish­ism. This is the pen that star­ted me down the slip­pery pen fet­ish­ism slope.

I’ve had about three or four of these pens, and have found that I some­times have to take a scalpel to the very tip of the syn­thetic brush to snip off a couple of errant bristles.

I have never had any other prob­lems with this pen though, and am prob­ably being a bit overly picky with the end of the tip.

Next, I got the Sailor Profit Brush Pen.

The Sailor Profit is very sim­ilar to the Pen­tel, but has a threaded lid, so you don’t inad­vert­ently uncap the pen in your pocket. The tip is more chis­elled than the Pen­tel, so it feels like you have more con­trol over the line thick­ness, but I did find it more dif­fi­cult to get cart­ridges. A really lovely pen though.

Shortly after get­ting this pen, I dis­covered the pen fetishist’s home page, Jet Pens. Beware though, Jet Pens are ena­blers. If you sus­pect that you may be a pen fet­ish­ist, you might want to avoid them for fear of stead­ily spend­ing all of your time and money buy­ing new and excit­ing pens. Anyway…

I found the Kur­etake No.13;

This is a gor­geous pen. It makes the first two pens in this post feel like draw­ing with filthy mops. If you match this pen up with the sable hair replace­ment tip, you basic­ally con­struct a Kur­etake No. 40…

…which is a very fine pen. A VERY VERY FINE PEN. The sable hair tip is springy, soft and gor­geous. I’m not sure what else to say without swear­ing, but this is a hel­lu­valuvelypen. Need­less to say, the hefty price-tag may anger or enrage your loved ones, but I think that this is worth it.

The only way to improve on this pen is to use a Plat­inum Con­verter with some Plat­inum Car­bon Ink, the finest, nicest ink that ever there was. For­get Noodlers (which is admit­tedly nice and comes in many more col­ours), this is the (black) ink for me. Again, rather pricy, but the smell and the sheer ‘black­ness’ of this ink is abso­lutely unbeat­able in my exper­i­ence. It works so well in these brush pens, as well as in foun­tain pens without clog­ging them, which has happened with a great deal of other inks I’ve used. This seam­lessly leads us through to;

Foun­tain Pens;

There are only a couple of foun­tain pens I want to write about, firstly the Rotring Art­pen;

Rotring make very fine foun­tain pens, king of which in my opin­ion is the Art­pen, which glides across the page like pol­ished wax. These can also take the Plat­inum Con­verter men­tioned pre­vi­ously, so ink isn’t a problem.

They have a vari­ety of nib widths and weights, so they are great for cal­li­graphy as well as drawing.

That said, I do have some com­plaints about these pens.

Firstly, they are slightly too long to fit into your pocket or stand­ard pen­cil case. This isn’t really a big moan though, they are very nicely bal­anced and sit snug in your hand while drawing.

The big com­plaint is that I have found them to be fairly incon­sist­ent. I had a 1.1 nib that has been non-stop superb, and a ‘B’ nib that has also been great, but I have had an appro­pri­ately named ‘F’ nib that would choose the least appro­pri­ate time to leak dis­pro­por­tion­ate amount of ink all over what you have been drawing.

Abso­lutely infuriating.

Next is a pen that I have a love-hate rela­tion­ship with, the Tachi­kawa School-G.

This pen feels dis­pos­able, but is refil­lable. It is designed for manga use, and has a G style flex­ible nib. You can get a superbly fine line or a line over a mil­li­metre thick. They take some wear­ing in before they are com­fort­able, but once worn in, they can be an abso­lute dream to draw or write with.

These pens do have a sig­ni­fic­ant down­side though. They are the fussi­est pens I’ve ever had. If you don’t use them every single day without fail and store them nib-down, they tend to dry out and become nearly unus­able. I’ve also had a nib shat­ter on me, spray­ing ink and tiny frag­ments of metal over a 15 cm radius, which I’m sure you’ll agree is less than ideal.

I’ve had four or five of these pens, and there hasn’t been one that wasn’t prob­lem­atic in some way or another. They do come in ‘Fine’ and ‘Extra-Fine’ though, and there is a sepia ver­sion as well that enjoys all the bene­fits and suf­fers all the prob­lems of the black.

The final pen I’d like to enthuse about is the Sailor Brush Style Foun­tain Pen.

This pen takes a bit of get­ting used to, but once you have the hang of it, you fall in love with it. The nib appears at first to be broken or bent, but this is a design fea­ture. You get the con­trol of a foun­tain pen and the vari­able line of a brush in one pen, depend­ing on which angle you hold the pen to the page.

Although I abso­lutely love these pens, I do have a couple of minor com­plaints about them. They are too long to fit snugly into a pocket, and don’t have a clip to hold them in your shirt pocket (every­one car­ries pens in their shirt pocket, right? That’s not just me is it?)

As the sur­face area of the broad end of the nib is quite large, it does some­times fall vic­tim to dry­ing occa­sion­ally, which can be worked out fairly easily.

All in all, a superb pen. I’ve been using the 55º nib for a while without any real prob­lems, and am cur­rently wait­ing on deliv­ery of the 40º nib, so I’ll be sure to answer any ques­tions about that.

Although this is prob­ably the least con­ten­tious post I’ve ever pos­ted, I’m sure someone some­where will point out some myth­ical pen some­where that I’ve missed that writes all wrongs (sorry), so I apo­lo­gise in advance if I’ve missed out your favour­ite pen. If you do have some kind of pen to add to the list, then yes, you are a pen fetishist.

Wel­come to the Pen­Lust club, your secret inky hand­shake will be sent to you shortly.