Loss

On 2 June 2008 Tim Buckley published a strip of his gaming webcomic Ctrl+Alt+Del in which the protagonist arrives at a hospital and finds his fiancée weeping after a miscarriage. There is no dialogue. Four panels: a man walking, a man at a door, a doctor, two figures by a bed.

It first appeared in 2008, during early YouTube.

The reception was hostile — critics found the tonal swerve unearned, and it became a standard example of injuring a female character to give a male one feelings. What happened next is the part that matters: readers began reproducing the strip's *composition* with anything at all, stripping it down until only the arrangement of shapes remained. Four vertical marks — | || || |_ — are now legible as Loss to a very large number of people, which is a compression of an image into pure pattern recognition that no other meme has achieved.

Loss is embedded in games, album covers, official brand posts and the architecture of buildings, usually as a joke about how far the abstraction can be pushed before it stops being recognisable. It has outlived the argument it started, and most people who spot it have never read the comic.