Between 1998 and 2004, there was a comic book publisher in the USA called Crossgen Comics.

As is the case with many comic companies, Crossgen’s various titles had shared themes and some overlap of concepts, one of which was that various characters had been endowed with superhuman abilities or powers after they’d been branded with a sigil – a mark which also doubled as Crossgen’s logo, and which looked like this:

In the comics, the origin of the sigils was a running mystery which was gradually explained over the course of a couple of years, but now, well after the event, it occurs to me that perhaps readers might have saved time by looking a bit closer to home for the origin of the sigil:

Or even – if you squint a bit – this, dating from the 1960s:

And to think people worry that I wasted my time at college. Fie, I say!