In 2004 and 2005,
Ctrl+Alt+Del was nominated for the
Web Cartoonists' Choice Awards Outstanding Gaming Comic award, and in 2005 it was nominated for Outstanding Comic. By December 2005, the webcomic was attracting an audience of over 300,000 readers each day, Readers of video game weblog
Joystiq voted Buckley's pair of comics that he wrote for the video game
Civilization IV: Beyond the Swords website as the most popular. Ross Miller of Joystiq described the two strips as ones that "played on historical anachronisms and World Wonder rule sets", while noting that he hoped that those who voted in the poll "didn't choose the strip for the Buttsylvania line". Writing for the
Chicago Tribune, Levi Buchanan compared
Ctrl+Alt+Del to
Penny Arcade, describing both as webcomics that take advantage of the lack of censorship on the web by using expletives when they are appropriate, and if they serve the story. Buchanan also considered
Ctrl+Alt+Del to be a webcomic with a smaller cast than that of
Penny Arcade, noting that the former focuses primarily on the two friends Ethan and Lucas, while the latter comprises a much larger cast. In 2005, William Kulesa of the
Jersey Journal called
Penny Arcade and
Ctrl+Alt+Del two of the best webcomics, but he felt that the latter was the best overall. He felt that the characters were well-developed, and both had "a sense of fullness often lacked by those found within daily strips. It never fails to draw a chuckle from this reader. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the land of the nerd will enjoy the strip." He compared the webcomic to
Penny Arcade, which he believed required that the reader be more familiar with "nerdy" topics, especially video gaming. Also in 2005, Mariam Asad wrote a piece for the
Chronicle Herald showcasing
Ctrl+Alt+Del as one of the better webcomics then available, listing several points that the webcomic had that interested her, including its characters, "colourful commentary on recently released games", and storylines that spanned several strips. In 2007, the
Knoxville News-Sentinel called
Ctrl+Alt+Del a "healthy dose of Web-comic-meets-videogame-playing-geek", describing its drawing style as "cartoonish" and its humor as one that "hilariously lampoons all things gaming through the lives of amateur artist Ethan, programmer Lucas and professional gamer Lilah". In April 2010, a new character called Abby was introduced as an antagonist to Ethan. A month later, the character's design was found to be copy of a Hector Moran sketch. Buckley redid Abby's clothing and issued an apology in light of this, stating he had mistook the sketch for a photo reference.
"Loss" Video game journalist
Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw has criticized
Ctrl+Alt+Del on several occasions for excessive use of dialogue and slow comic pacing, among other reasons. In 2008, Buckley published the critically panned strip "
Loss", the culmination of a storyline in which Ethan and Lilah were expecting their first child. In the strip Ethan discovers that Lilah's pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage, a significant tonal shift in a comic typically known for humorous situations. In an interview with
Joystiq on August 29, 2008, when asked about the comic,
Jerry Holkins of
Penny Arcade said that "Tim Buckley is the antichrist, and I think [that] storyline was the first horseman of the Apocalypse", while
Mike Krahulik stated "I think he's an art criminal." "Loss" later became an
internet meme in its own right, with Aryehi Bhushan of
Varsity referring to it in 2017 as "infamous" and "the internet's largest meme juggernaut". In 2010, Shaula Clark of
The Boston Phoenix described Buckley as a polarizing figure who created a devoted fanbase for his webcomic while receiving criticism from peers such as
Yahtzee and the writers of
Penny Arcade. She goes on to attempt to determine why
Ctrl+Alt+Del receives the amount of criticism that it has, believing that Buckley's attempt to take a webcomic originally created to showcase strips focusing on
Warcraft-related jokes and "the monkey-cheese-ninja random wackiness of manchild main character Ethan" in a new direction by adding "excruciatingly slow, melodramatic, ham-handed plot arcs" helped lead to the negative feedback that the strip has received. Clark points to the "
Loss" story arc, which focuses on Lilah's miscarriage, in particular as an example of this. She also regards the holiday invented by Buckley and introduced in
Ctrl+Alt+Del, Winter-een-mas, as an "obnoxious gamer holiday" that runs every year from January 25 to 31. ==Bibliography==