Goddess Mode #4 // Review
Family, friendship, and business are mixed in a world of magic, mystery and alien tech as writer Zoë Quinn and artist Robbi Rodriguez’s Goddess Mode reaches its fourth issue. Color is rendered to the page by Rico Renzi. Though the story at the center of the action is genuinely impressive, the fourth issue drags itself through the typically bewildering exposition of heavy-duty world building. Thankfully, there’s wit and poetry around the edges of the lengthy dialogue that gives the issue enough gravity to maintain interest. Above all Quinn and Rodriguez construct a very unique experience for the comic book page.
Somewhere between the Analog world and the information-based world of Azoth, Cassandra finds her father. He tells her to be careful. She’s making some of the same mistakes he is. Before there’s a chance to understand anything, Cassandra is booted out into the real world. She’s among friends in a bar. There’s danger out there for her and everyone she knows. Things are, and they’re about to get worse as Cassandra tries to understand the strange mix of magic and tech that her world is suddenly beginning to consist of.
Quinn’s drama takes many forms. Cassandra is pushed out of a transcendental experience with her father only to be earthbound in a bar having a few drinks with a few friends. Then she’s off to engage in a little bit of investigation with an AI that’s ostensibly there as a tutorial for a new job that her father warned her about. There’s a hell of a lot of background being delivered her, but Quinn has found an excellent range of different ways in which to achieve it. As quaint as Quinn gets with the complex architecture of Goddess Mode, her scripting is at its best when people are merely talking to each other. There are some staggeringly bright little bits of dialogue lurking around the corners of the action.
Quinn’s script is brought to life with Rodriguez’s pleasantly restless visuals. Cassandra talks with her father in a vertiginous background that echoes some of the nightmares of the rest of the sinister realm of Azoth. Back home at the bar, there’s a focus on emotional interactions in darkened rooms. The colorful visual of text exchanges between Cassandra and her friends are bright and crisp against the faded pastels of the world they’re all living in. Renzi adds considerable depth to everything with bright splashes of color and little expanses punctuated by stretches of glowing color that gracefully emulate video static.
On the whole, it’s another satisfying slide into the fantasy cyberpunk of Goddess Mode. Quinn is beginning to run the risk of falling so far into exposition that it’s going to completely overtake the issue. There are a few pages where most of the real estate is wholly covered in dialogue balloons. This is perfectly fine for the development of concepts, but the visuals and the story begin to feel as though they’re sliding apart on different tracks. Hopefully, there will be a greater script/art integration in issues to come.
