Really. This is, literally, The Marker. I specifically asked for it while visiting the friend I gave it to so I could take it home with me and snap a photo of it. He thought I was a bit odd for making the request. Can you imagine?
Don't answer that.
There is a story as to why this marker earned that title. And it all begins with my purchase of Copic Set 72-A. I had saved up and purchased this set because Copic is the choice of manga artists in Japan and I want to be a manga artist someday, so there you have it. I ordered my set through the Carpe Diem Art Store because they had the best prices I could find at the time. But I don't think they had the markers in stock; I had a long wait of nearly a month before I got them. When the package finally arrived, I discovered that it had two E37 (Sepia) markers, and I didn't want to go through the hassle of sending the whole thing back just for one marker. So I bought an E44 (Clay) to replace the duplicate, done.
Now I wanted to play around with the markers, but I didn't just want to waste them, so I thought I'd use the extra Sepia when testing the different kinds of papers I had been planning to use them on. And I quickly discovered that the color saturation varied greatly from type to type. But that's not the point of the story. The point is that I was using The Marker heavily on and off over a period of several weeks, scribbling, cross-hatching and filling areas of color on Canson Bristol 96 lb, plain copier paper, Copic Manga Illustration paper made specifically for these markers, Strathmore Marker paper, and probably a few others that I can't recall right now. Suffice it to say that The Marker should have run out of ink somewhere along the way from all the testing. But it didn't. I would set it aside for a couple of days and when I picked it up to test on more paper it was as strong as it was when I used it the first time. Maybe I had underestimated the capacity of the felt. Maybe it was the lack of sleep and the resulting over-caffeinated haze I'd been in for a few days that made me hallucinate and imagine its legendary endurance, but it just seemed like it was going on and on and on and on. And so it got its name.
I finally passed it on to a friend of mine with some extras I had collected after an ebay windfall. When I visited that same friend this evening to drop off a cat-themed car magnet that my sister had left as a gift during her last visit, I asked for The Marker so I could take a photo of it. Just out of curiosity, I popped off the cap and doodled a little to see how it was faring. Not as strong as it used to be, but I'm really surprised it works at all.
And thus ends the story of The Marker. I'm just full of stories. Stick around.
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