King Gojulas, never die.

The best guess about the origin of the Kilroy image is that two already popular memes merged together in an unholy alliance – the dude with the nose was probably a well-known British doodle called “Mr. Chad,” and as for the caption, we can thank an American welding inspector from Quincy, Mass., named James J. Kilroy.

Back in those days, it was up to men like Kilroy to inspect the rivets of whatever piece of metal their employers paid them to stare at all day. Most inspectors simply approved the work by marking it with a piece of chalk, but Kilroy decided to add some excitement to his dead-end job by signing “Kilroy was here.” Apparently he was pretty goddamn prolific.

Somehow, Kilroy’s message combined with the already popular image of Mr. Chad became so popular that GIs began to scribble Kilroy’s name and new identity onto everything they passed throughout the war: bunkers, bridges, walls, the Arc de Triomphe and likely Hitler’s bathroom at Eagle’s Nest. Once the war was won, an epic race broke out to stick Kilroy’s name and face on whatever else existed anywhere, from the Statue of Liberty to the Berlin Wall to, no joke, the moon.At the height of the fad, it was common for pranksters to approach some landmark or another and whip out their markers, only to find that Kilroy had already been there.