Midweek, Briefly Feeling Pointless
No, it’s not what you might think: a revelatory Spill post, sharing my cartoonist’s angst during the 3/4s slog through a double issue period (during these double issue weeks, there is always a week “off” from submitting work. This means at least one week will pass when there is no chance of hearing, on a Friday, if a submitted drawing has met with success at The New Yorker‘s art meeting). No, it’s not that. It’s about the sudden, but unexpected demise of a long-time Rapidograph point — one I’ve been hanging on to for years.
Below: an old friend heads off to the Rapidograph point graveyard
It served well, until this week, when even a daily cleaning could not keep it from “acting up.” For quite some time now, I’d begin drawing each day hoping the point would keep the ink flowing, but early warning signs crept into the morning hours of sitting with pen and paper. Eventually the line would give out — the point would scrape the paper, and no ink line would appear. That meant that the daily ritual of cleaning at the kitchen sink would begin. The cleaning took only a few minutes — and honestly, I enjoyed the process. I knew that once the point was clean, the pen would function beautifully for the rest of the day.
This week was different. The daily cleaning led to a mid-morning cleaning, and even — how I hate to admit it — emergency use of a Pilot V5 pen during those moments I was having too much fun mid-drawing to set everything aside for a visit to the kitchen sink and another Rapidograph cleansing.
Left: When there’s a point problem, the page looks like this — lots of attempts to get the line flowing properly.
Giving in to reality, I brought out my bag of points (shown at the top of this post), thinking I had a rookie point at hand — a “new” (not yet used) replacement point. In fact, what I had were older points, some of them slipped into Rapidograph packaging to protect them. Much like looking for the foot that fit the glass slipper, I began trying on used points to see if any would still let ink flow. This auditioning process took some time. Each point had to be attached to the pen’s barrel, and then taken for a spin across paper. The slipper didn’t fit for any of the points — the ink did not flow properly — until the last point tried. The thinking during this try-out phase, as each point failed, was that it was essential to order a new point asap, or do the unthinkable, finally give in and use, full-time, another kind of pen. That last will never happen. The Rapidograph, though sometimes challenging, has been with me for a very long time — since I was in my teens. There is nothing else like it. It may seem odd to some for someone to devote this much attention to a pen point, but I can only say that in this particular cartoonist’s life, that particular point bears a lot of responsibility. How it works often dictates what is drawn. The feel of the ink line can, believe it or not, determine the subject matter.
The happy ending is, as mentioned, that I eventually found a used point that flows well (shown below, in situ). Why I’d retired it long ago I don’t know. I do know that it’s working beautifully….so far. Oddly, I haven’t even had to clean it since it was brought back from the Rapidograph point graveyard. It seems happily resurrected.
