*pushes my glasses up my nose* CAD was not just “a popular webcomic with some detractors” it was like… idk it was like the Big Bang Theory of webcomics: a soulless, cynical, hacky attempt to cash in on a specific trend in nerd culture (in this case the gamer webcomic) which had been run into the ground by countless pasty nerd bros who read Penny Arcade and thought “I can do that!” by the time CAD showed up on the scene. It was infamous for being the worst of the worst, with only Shredded Moose being more offensive in terms of content, although nobody knew about Shredded Moose (it had a brief 15 minutes with the advent of Your Webcomic Is Bad And You Should Feel Bad, which is now defunct, but other than that it was deservedly obscure) and everyone knew about CAD, and everyone who knew about CAD absolutely LOATHED it. The degree to which it consistently sucked was a meme long before loss.jpg happened. Tim Buckley plagiarized character designs, used senseless, non-sequitor violence when he couldn’t come up with a proper punchline (which was often), and was generally the most notoriously lazy, unethical, sleazebag hack in the webcomics scene.
ENTER LOSS.JPG. It’s important to know that when loss.jpg appeared in CAD, it came out of nowhere. It was like the worst stand-up comedian stopped in the middle of his routine and was like, “let’s all take a minute to think about miscarriage,” and then just stared at you uncomfortably for ten minutes. The response from the internet was a resounding “what the FUCK, Buckley”, and it probably would have fizzled out if he hadn’t responded with a lengthly explanation about how he’d actually been planning on dropping this bomb for WEEKS, and it was all inspired by his college ex girlfriend who’d had a miscarriage while they were dating, which was the catalyst for him dumping her because she was “toxic”. At no point in this multi-paragraph, navel-gazing essay did Buckley attempt to empathize with his ex-girlfriend, the person who’d actually gone through the miscarriage. This lack of empathy extends to the comic itself - listen: it’s LILAH’S MISCARRIAGE, and she’s in ONE PANEL. The narrative of the strip is entirely about Buckley’s stand-in. Lilah’s devastation is inserted in the place where, in every single previous strip, a hacky “jokes!!!!”-type punchline had been. It’s also important to note that until loss.jpg, Lilah as a character basically existed solely for Buckley’s stand-in to fuck. Like. She had little, if not no, personality of her own outside of “oh she loves this nerdy guy and she likes all the things he likes and she’s a GIRL with BOOBS” - she was standard wish-fulfillment material for nerd boys with low standards for webcomics. And then she’s given this major trauma and it’s basically just used as a vehicle to further the storyline of the dude and inspire him to “grow up”.
The initial edits of loss.jpg that I saw were almost all along the lines of “can you believe this fucking asshole thought this was appropriate” - they deliberately highlighted the hacky, insensitive nature of the comic. The joke wasn’t miscarriages, the joke was a man for whom miscarriage was a convenient plot point, even when his own literal real-life girlfriend was going through one herself. Which isn’t to say that there weren’t and aren’t just like, stupid 4chan trolls who took the memeification of loss.jpg and decided that what was funny about it was that it was about a miscarriage, because that happened and happens, and I feel like a lot of the more current loss.jpg memes really suffer from losing the original context - why the original loss.jpg was such a giant “what the fuck” moment that it suck in the internet’s collective consciousness in the first place. But to say that Buckley is a misunderstood artist who tried his best to tackle a sensitive subject is such an intense misreading of what actually happened with loss.jpg that I CAN’T EVEN HANDLE IT, STOOOPPPPPPPPPP
