Goddess Mode #6 // Review
Digital and analog worlds collide in the final issue of Zoe Quinn’s Goddess Mode. The world is about to change in a very big way for the entire ensemble of Quinn’s six-part series in a dialogue-heavy issue that rather quickly resolves everything. “End of File,” is drawn by artist Robbi Rodriguez with colorist Rico Renzi. There’s an overall sense of bewilderment in the dizzying speed with which the whole six-issue saga draws to an end. Goddess Mode is a dense, little cyberpunk fantasy that closes itself off just as it was beginning to get interesting again.
The origin of the digital world has been revealed. There’s a great end to everything coming. Cassandra and her friends are forced to make decisions they’d rather not make from choices that aren’t exactly pleasant. Anger explodes as an ensemble of characters have at each other in suitably dramatic fashion one last time before the inevitable close of the series. When the group finally emerges from the magical digital info-space, everything’s different, but maybe only on the inside as everyone tries to work out the meaning of it all. It’s a bittersweet end in cluttered panels straight through to the final page.
Zoe Quinn wraps-up the series with what feels like a mad dash to the final panel. There’s a HELL of a lot of conflict to get through and a LOT that has to be resolved in huge expanses of dialogue as characters confront each other in a digital fantasy world. Quinn does a pretty good job of juggling it all. but tightly-crammed panels of drama aren’t exactly the breathtaking fusion of cyberpunk and fantasy that the series could have evolved into given the right amount of time. It’s nice that she was able to get it to come to a close in six issues. It feels concise. Too bad it doesn’t also feel well-constructed.
Rodriguez isn’t able to do a whole lot with the amount of story that has to be crammed into this issue and no matter how fantastic the virtual world is, it’s scarcely all that interesting if the panels are all pointed in the direction of people yelling at each other. There’s nothing kinetic or particularly visually appealing about the way Rodriguez brings it to a close, but it’s hard to blame him. Renzi continues to cast it all in cool shades of color and the occasional bit of video static, but there’s something quite definitely missing as the story falls off the final panel.
If the rumors are true, the DC Vertigo imprint that Goddess Mode is a part of is coming to a close. It’s possible that Quinn and company weren’t entirely ready for the end of the series. Maybe things ended up getting rushed at the end because they didn’t plan for it. If that was the case, perhaps it would have been better to lengthen aspects of the final argument into something much less final. It would have been much more satisfying if everything fell off a cliff with no resolution at all.
