Is This Loss?

About

Is This Loss? refers to a catchphrase and series of parodies of the infamous Loss cartoon strip in which people mock the webcomic's four panels, typically represented in minimalistic components as "| || || |_," in different formats of media. Loss strip parodies, known as Loss Edits, and Losslikes started around 2014 on Reddit, 4chan and Facebook and continued to spread throughout the internet over the following decade, with users often posing the question, "Is this Loss?" alongside visually similar imagery.

Origin

On June 2nd, 2008, Tim Buckley^[1] released the comic Loss in which the female lead Lilah suffers a miscarriage (seen below). The strip was widely criticized for the unexpected tonal shift in the Ctrl+Alt+Del series.

Alongside outright mockery of the strip, a trend arose on the 4chan /v/ board in the following years, which involved taking the Loss strip and representing it in different ways. Usually, these would attempt to be minimalistic, portraying the characters as lines, dots, or just having four empty panels.

Know Your Meme^[3] user @Bridget posted one of the earliest known parodies of the Loss strip on August 26th, 2011, amassing more than 123,000 views in 12 years (seen below, left). The earliest known minimalist version of the strip was posted on X^[2] by @Pires5Pedro in December 2011 (seen below, right).

It's unknown exactly when the phrase "is this Loss?" first appeared online, but many images, titles and posts including the question began appearing online around 2017 and 2018 as the catchphrase started becoming increasingly prevalent. On July 7th, 2018, Urban Dictionary^[6] user SuperSpiderOnePunchDeadPoolMan added a definition for the phrase to the site, receiving over 50 likes in six years (definition seen below).

I II
I I_
Normie: *looks at 4 panel meme* "is this loss?"
Me and intellectual: "obviously you twelvey, go back to playing Fortnite"

Spread

Parodies of the Loss comic strip continued to spread throughout the internet over the following decade, inspiring the "Is this Loss?" catchphrase to be used alongside the minimalist versions of the comic, which is represented by a four-panel strip with a single vertical line, two vertical lines with one slightly shorter than the other, another set of two perpendicular lines, and the final panel with a vertical line and a horizontal line.

For instance, on September 21st, 2017, Tumblr^[7] user cubedcoconut posted an edit of a comic referencing Loss that included the question "Is this Loss?" in it, receiving over 500 notes in seven years (seen below).

Redditor^[5] @FrogNation15 posted on January 8th, 2020, a screenshot of a Facebook post referencing the Loss strip to the r/IsThisLoss subreddit, which is a channel focused on finding all "Is this loss" memes on the internet. The post (seen below, left) amassed more than 200 upvotes in roughly four years.

On May 7th, 2024, X^[4] user @yuukiya_art posted a version of the Hey What's Ur Job comic strip featuring the Loss edit lines, captioning "Is this loss chat?" The post (seen below, right) received roughly 5,300 likes and 317 reposts in two months.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References