Anyone care to hazard some theories as to why these two identical posts got such different responses?

This was posted to r/comics yesterday. Six days prior, the same comic was posted to the same reddit, and with the same headline. The only differences are a) they were submitted by different users, b) on different days, and c) one was a direct link to the artist's site while the other was rehosted on imgur.

Oh, right: and d) the earlier submission currently has 59 up votes while the later one has 1,844.

I'm not out to redress the supposed balance, so don't take this as a campaign to vote one down and the other up. I just want to ask the question: What accounts for that disparity? Is it just timing? Has then been a shift in reddit consciousness such that we're actually biased in favor of imgur-based submissions? Do political elections make everyone crave cookies?