Here at The Cracked Looking Glass we love Kickstarter. We funded our first in print comic book using it, and it allowed us to produce a product far superior to what we would otherwise have been able to come up with (funded with just the loose change we poor artists could scrape from our car ashtrays or from between our couch cushions). It enabled us to produce something of which we are genuinely proud (and which—by the way— is available for purchase right here). It’s a disturbing trend lately, as the mass production of most of our consumer goods gets off-shored overseas by large scale manufacturers, that entry into the business game keeps becoming increasingly harder for startups. That’s a major problem, because startups— the people with the kernel of an original idea— are the suppliers of our BEST STUFF! Once corporations grow to a scale where they start farming out production to other countries, they usually (though not always) wind up funneling most of their creativity and innovation into figuring out new ways to keep us paying for stuff we already purchased or will never need (i.e: the Adobe Creative Cloud or the Apple Watch). But Kickstarter is where you find cool NEW ideas! Like The Ultimate Cooler, The 3doodler, or something I’m really excited about: The Wink Pen.
Confession: I love fountain pens. I’m left handed, and if you don’t know, roller ball pens have a gel-like ink that dries fairly quickly, but which remains kind of smudgy if your hand passes over it again and again. For most people that’s not a big deal, but for we lefties it’s a constant problem. A few years back, based on the recommendations of some dude in a YouTube video, I started using fountain pens. The ink, although initially WAY easier to smudge, dries much more quickly and doesn’t give me the dreaded “black palm” I’d come to loathe and expect.
So given my natural predisposition to fountain pens, I was understandably excited when I saw the Wink Pen on Kickstarter. I immediately funded it at a high-enough level to actually get my hands on one of these things.
Having gone through the tedious process of running a Kickstarter campaign myself, I know how tough it can be to inch toward that goal line. By spotlighting the Wink Pen here, I hope to give a worthy project a much-needed boost. If you’re into writing, if you’re into drawing, if you like cool pens, this is for you. We don’t ask for a lot here at Cracked Looking Glass, nor are we asking you to give us any money. But please consider helping this inventor out so we can ALL have these AWESOME PENS. And to prove I’m not screwing around, if you support this project and it gets fully funded I will do an original drawing of any of the comic characters we have created in any liquid you want, WITH THE ACTUAL WINK PEN. How sweet is that?