2010-07-14
Explanation
This comic offers a humorous alternate take on the Greek myth of Icarus. In the traditional myth, Daedalus crafts wings of feathers and wax for himself and his son Icarus, warning him not to fly too close to the sun. Icarus ignores the warning, the wax melts, and he falls to his death -- a parable about hubris and disobedience. In Weinersmith's version, the first panel shows Daedalus (the bald older man in a toga) attaching wings to Icarus. The second panel shows Icarus taking flight in silhouette. But in the third panel, Icarus crashes spectacularly into water or rocks, his wings broken, while Daedalus shouts "It didn't f-king work!" -- implying the wings simply failed as a mechanical device from the start, with no need for the sun to be involved at all.
The caption reads: "Of course, the Tale of Icarus was somewhat revised before publication." The joke is that the real story was not about hubris or flying too close to the sun at all -- it was just a straightforward engineering failure. The mythologized version with the moral lesson about overreaching ambition was a later revision to make the embarrassing crash sound more profound.
The votey panel shows an ancient-looking document where the original text "In retrospect, wax and feathers were a foolhardy" has been crossed out and replaced with "Icarus flew too close to the sun, like an idiot." This reinforces the joke that the myth was literally edited to change the narrative from "the invention did not work" to a grander moral fable, poking fun at how myths get rewritten to serve didactic purposes.