There are times when I look at one of my pencil, and I can’t but ask myself “why?”.
For instance, allow me to show you this MP I got recently in a bulk of vintage items I bought: it is a comic-strip-related specimen which displays the famous Snoopy character from the Peanuts series: it’s a stubby, short, light, peculiar memory from the Nineties — well, I think, based on the insane amount of yellowing on the barrel.
Despite its seemingly mundane appearance, turns out that this object might have some vague pedigree after all: it was made by Tombow, and apparently it is an example of a Tombow Sugar in 0.5, as can be read on the imprint opposite the cartoon character (I assume that “SH-250 F M N 09” is the product code).
As I said, the plastic of the barrel seems to have suffered from a severe case of yellowing, even though this seems not the case for the rear pushbutton and the front end of the pencil, which have both retained a nice pale blue shade, which screams “1990-ish” from every angle.
The particular reason I can’t really understand the why’s and how’s of this pencil, however, lies in the very tip: there is a ridiculously short metal lead sleeve, fixed of course, which places the pencil right in the wrong corner of any possible classification: it is not a drafting tool for sure, but it cannot really be considered a note-taking item, as that tiny metal spike seem to demand some sort of technical character. Really head-scratching.
Closeup of the tip (by the way: upon disassembling the blue cone, I found a nice rubber retainer, a brass metal safety clip, probably to avoid damages to the delicate plastic screw threads, and internals showing a level of quality higher than what I initially expected).
I even suspected this stupidly short sleeve may be the result of a traumatic encounter between the MP and the floor, somewhere along its relatively stretched lifespan, but I can’t find any other signs of such a fall elsewhere on the body, which is preserved admittedly well for the age and quality of the plastic parts.
Other elements and accents make this pencil even stranger: the metal clip is unusually ornate, with its four almost imperceptible dents — two in the zone closer to the gripping flanges, two right before the hook-y end — even if the brass colour goes into a head-on collision with the now-creamy hue of the body.
At the end of the day, this item asks way more questions than the answers it offers, and since I know nothing about cartoon-related pencil, maybe some expert here will be willing to elaborate on the theme, and provide more meaning to a pencil which has so much personality I still can’t decide whether I like it very much, or just a little. 
