icarus-2
Explanation
This comic retells the myth of Daedalus and Icarus with a twist. In the original Greek myth, Daedalus builds wings of feathers and wax for himself and his son Icarus to escape imprisonment in a tower. Icarus flies too close to the sun, the wax melts, and he falls to his death -- a cautionary tale about hubris and ignoring wise counsel.
In this version, the comic recounts the familiar setup: Daedalus and Icarus are trapped in a tower, so they build wings of feathers and wax. Icarus flies too high, causing the wax to melt. But then the comic introduces a modern engineering sensibility -- someone suggests that Daedalus should have built in a defect that would cause the wings to automatically descend when overheated, essentially a fail-safe mechanism. Another character points out that of course Daedalus would have thought of that, and that Icarus is actually still alive, having landed safely. The scene then shifts to a domestic setting where Icarus is shown living a normal, uneventful life with his family, with someone saying "I love you, Dad."
The comic subverts the tragic myth by applying practical engineering thinking to it. The humor comes from deflating one of Western literature's most famous tragedies with mundane competence -- of course a genius inventor like Daedalus would have included a safety feature. The result transforms an iconic cautionary tale into a story with a boringly happy ending, which is both anticlimactic and oddly heartwarming. The title "icarus-2" suggests this is the sequel nobody asked for: Icarus's unremarkable but pleasant life after the non-disaster.