Loss (Ctrl+Alt+Del)

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.

[5] Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, creator of the video game review series Zero Punctuation, referenced CAD in his episode on video game webcomics, where he mentioned that having a story line where a character miscarries in a webcomic known for humor would be considered "an awkward tonal shift at best and hugely disrespectful of the subject matter at worst".

[6] Kotaku's Mike Fahey, formerly a self-declared fan of the webcomic, agreed with Croshaw's complaints, mentioning being unable to read the series like he used to.

He said that he told the story from Ethan's viewpoint because that was the only reference he had, reflecting that he was afraid of miscalculating a woman's perspective on the subject and was not confident in his writing abilities to do it justice.

[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".

[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.

[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.