Ctrl+Alt+Del, abbreviated as CAD, is a webcomic series by Tim Buckley. Created in October 2002, the comic focuses on characters Ethan, Lucas, and later Ethan's love interest Lilah.[2] Prior to "Loss", CAD focused on gaming humor, alternating between multi-strip story arcs and one-off gags, often featuring characters sitting on a couch riffing about the game they were playing.
Brian Feldman of the magazine New York described the earlier tone of the strip as "amusing at best and puerile at worst, resorting to violence as a punch line with noticeable frequency."[1] In 2008, during a storyline where Ethan and Lilah were expecting their first child, Buckley posted the strip "Loss", a dramatic tonal shift from previous CAD strips
The strip was a four-panel comic with Ethan entering a hospital, asking a receptionist for directions, talking to a doctor, and finding Lilah crying on her side in a hospital bed, implying that she had suffered a miscarriage. There were two more comics set at the hospital in the storyline, before CAD returned to typical material.[3] When he published "Loss", Buckley wrote a blog post explaining that he had planned the storyline years in advance. Personal experience in his life inspired the strip, namely an unplanned pregnancy and miscarriage with an ex-girlfriend in college.[1][4]
Legacy as an Internet meme A minimalist version of a comic strip named "Loss", consisting of only seven lines. First panel: one vertical line, second panel: two vertical lines that one of the left is longer, second panel: two vertical lines that share the same length each other, forth panel: one vertical line and one horizonal line. The horizonal one is below the vertical one. A minimalist version of "Loss", consisting of only seven lines After the strip was published, it immediately became an internet meme, with users from sites such as 4chan and Tumblr creating edits of the strip, recreating it using scenes from other works such as Futurama and Pokémon. 4chan's video game board /v/ would later ban users who created new threads about these edits.[1]
Parodies of the strip became more abstract, representing it with objects placed generally in the same position as the characters, such as hot dogs, pipes from Super Mario Bros., or the text from "For sale: baby shoes, never worn".[3] A minimalist version of the meme involves the sequence in the same four-panel style; first panel with a single vertical line, second panel with two vertical lines, the second line slightly shorter, third panel with two equal vertical lines, and the fourth panel with a vertical line and a horizontal line. A response to recognizing the meme, a meme in of itself, was "Is this Loss?"[1][9] The meme saw a resurgence around 2017.[9] Brian Feldman declared it as "the Internet's Longest-Running Miscarriage 'Joke'".[1] In 2016, the podcast Reply All discussed the strip in their analysis of a variant of "Loss" that was used as a joke about the results in the 2016 United States presidential election. The hosts described it as a pattern that viewers would never recognize unless they were already familiar with it, and said that because the strip was stark and iconic, that also made it easy to parody.[3]
On June 2, 2018, the tenth anniversary of "Loss", the original strip was replaced by an edit of the comic titled "Found".[10] While almost all of the comic remained the same, in the last panel Ethan instead looks at the audience with a smirk on his face. A day later, the original strip was restored with no explanation for the replacement.[9] Julia Alexander from Polygon considered "Found" to be an acknowledgement of the status "Loss" had achieved as a meme, comparing the evolution of the strip to Pepe the Frog.[11] Similarly, on June 2, 2019, the strip was replaced by an edit of the comic titled "Cross". This edit replaced the last panel with one where the birth was successful; however, the child's face is a minimalist version of the comic itself.[12]
