SUN FLIGHT

In this version of the Daedalus and Icarus story, McDermott returns to the lush sun and earth colors of Arrow to the Sun, but adds a good share of sparkling Aegean blue and a dramatic black background for his blue and violet labyrinth. As usual, he is best at semi-abstract backgrounds—the gorgeous skyline of a seacoast town; the Greek-inspired blocks that constitute the labyrinth—and totally unsuccessful at investing his figures with either power or pathos. His depiction of the scorched Icarus falling, head first and wings aflame, is apt; but it is set, characteristically, in the center of an inflated sequence of five essentially wordless double-page displays which tend to undermine that one effective image. As usual too, McDermott's writing suffers from a touch of grandiloquence and an absence of warmth, and as usual the visual spectacle tends lo overwhelm the story. Overall, both the telling and the pictures have a distancing effect.