The term “About Loss” relates to a famous cartoon strip from the video game-themed webcomic series Ctrl+Alt+Del in which the female lead has a miscarriage. Other names for the strip include CADbortion, Loss.jpg, and. The series’ abrupt and, in the eyes of many readers, disastrous dramatic tone shift resulted in widespread internet parody of the comic strip. Since its publication a decade ago, it has been the target of extensive parody, often in minimalist interpretations of the four panels of the comic strip.
Origin
On June 2nd, 2008, Buckley uploaded a comic titled “Loss,” in which the female character Lilah has a miscarriage. The strip showed a notable change in tone from the typically hilarious comic, and the poorly-executed drama of the comic led Ctrl+Alt+Del’s large anti-fandom to mock.
Spread
The comic quickly became a target for mockery and parody following its publication, with a number of well-known webcomics, including HijiNKS Ensue, Cyanide and Happiness, Bigger Than Cheeses, EEGRA Hilarity Comics, Fanboys, and Slackerz, starting parodies of the comic and its last panel in particular.
In addition to Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw of Zero Punctuation[10] and Shmorky from Something Awful’s Flash Tub, other well-known online personas who made fun of the comic included The /v/ board on 4chan, which was so inundated with parodies that administrators started banning anyone who started fresh “Loss” posts.
Particularly cruel users of Something Awful made imitation threads Someone even went so far as to create a random CAD comic generator, implicitly ridiculing the fact that even the comic’s jumbled and mismatched panels are funnier than the ones that came before.
Is This Loss?
A trend developed on /v/ that involves using the Loss strip and depicting it in various ways, in addition to the strip being openly mocked. These often made an effort to be minimalist, showing the characters as lines, dots, or simply four empty panels. Any four-pane comic with a similar design can be identified as Loss, just as anything with green and purple can be.
Over the following ten years, edits like this persisted on the internet. People were unclear whether every four-panel graphic they saw online was indeed a “Loss” parody due to the prevalence of these parodies. As a result, the query “Is This Loss?” started to circulate like a meme.
Legacy
The comic strip “Loss” has been around for over 10 years and has become a popular meme. In 2015, Buckley spoke with Select All about the effect of the comic. He acknowledged that he occasionally found the memes annoying, but also said that he occasionally found them “pretty entertaining.” In 2017, KnowYourMeme wrote an article titled “The Internet’s Greatest Meme” about the comic. On June 2, 2018, Buckley updated the page to display a parody of his own work in which the main character of the comic breaks the fourth wall. The transition was covered in stories from a number of media, including Polygon and io9, which also touched on the effect of the comic strip.
