So how old were you when you first saw this thing? I think I was around eight years old when someone drew it in front of me. It’s simple – three parallel lines in two sets, joined diagonally from left to right, and then given little pointy bits on the bottom and the top. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Fierce and cool – and I found it addictive to draw.
Wasn’t long before all my school textbooks had The S scrawled over them. I loved it – but I never really thought about where it came from or what it meant.
So I started thinking about it again recently and decided to turn to The Google Machine to see if I could find out more. It seemed unanimous – nobody knows where it came from, but everyone seemed to love it. From Reddit to Facebook to message boards across the internet, everyone seemed to be clueless but pretty nostalgic about it.
The S seems to be pretty ubiquitous – it’s showed up across the globe, and in regions that don’t even use the Roman alphabet like Russia and Asia. A lot of people think it showed up in the 80s and 90s, but other people remember seeing it as early as the 1960s. With its fierce, pointy look, it could have been from a 80s metal band or something, some people thought. Others felt maybe it was an early version of the Superman logo from the early 1930s. Others thought maybe it was from a brand of clothing known as Stussy.
Finally I asked a bunch of my friends.
One thought it was definitely the Superman S. Not from Superman directly, though – he thought that kids would draw it and kind of think of Superman when they did so, with the real reason being that it’s just a cool thing to draw. Meanwhile, if you go back to the original Superman logos, they don’t look anything like The S. The Superman Shield hardly ever connects to itself and has a lot of open space in it, so that’s definitely not it.
Another friend of mine thought it was the Stussy S. But this doesn’t seem like a good fit either. If The S has been around since the 60s at least, that predates Stussy as a brand by a good 20 years since they weren’t founded until the 1980s. Plus, the actual Stussy logo looks nothing like it.
Finally, a third friend thought the logo kind of resembled the emblem for Suzuki. This one is actually kinda close, but at the same time it’s subtly different because, well, it’s red, and the logo isn’t connected like it is in The S.
There’s also the idea that The S is a heavy metal band emblem. The closest I could find was the logo for Saxon, an English metal band from the late 70s, but it’s much more sharp and has a staff. Really kind of a double-headed axe, right? So what is it? What the hell is The S? Is it just so popular because it’s fun to draw?
Then, somewhere on some forgotten message board someone pointed that it kind of resembles a Moebius strip. It’s got this perpetual flow to it, though it can’t be drawn continuously. This seemed to be a pretty good explanation to me – I know I couldn’t draw worth a shit at the age of 8 or 9, but I sure could churn out those little S’s on everything I could.
So, yeah – not a Superman Shield, not the Stussy logo, not even the Saxon emblem or the Suzuki brand. Just a weird, fun little thing that kind of represents eternity. Crazy, right?