The "Cool S"

You start with two sets of three short parallel lines, connect the diagonals, cap it top and bottom, and — fourteen line segments later — you have the "Cool S," also called the Universal S, Stüssy S, or Superman S. It was the closest thing to a universal human doodle: scratched into desks and textbook covers, inked on knuckles, graffitied on walls, passed from one kid to the next with no teacher, no book, and no brand behind it.

And that's the real mystery — nobody actually knows where it came from. It was already prevalent in graffiti culture by the early 1980s, but its true origin is undocumented and, most likely, unknowable. Every confident explanation you've heard is wrong: it is not the logo of the streetwear brand Stüssy (the company has explicitly denied it), it is not the Superman emblem (the shapes are plainly different), and it is not, despite the schoolyard rumors, a symbol of the band Sacred Reich, the Suzuki logo, or any street gang — all of those attributions have been specifically debunked.

The lack of an origin is exactly what makes it fascinating: a self-replicating piece of folk art, a pre-internet meme that propagated purely through imitation for decades. Long after the notebooks were recycled, the Cool S remains one of the most widely recognized drawings on earth that nobody can trace.