The path of Promethea is a long one. Or at least it’s a convoluted one. The path, for the most part, is many things and goes in many different directions, sometimes looping back upon itself endlessly. But then that’s a part of the structure of the story Alan Moore, J.H. Williams III, Mick Gray, Jeromy Cox, and Todd Klein take us one while we wind our way through the third volume of Promethea.

I bring up paths because Sophie Bangs is going to go on a journey. After spending more time studying magic, she’s decided what her next step as Promethea is. But before she can do that, she has to make sure the realm she exists in now is safe. While Sophie searches the realms for Barbara Shelly and her husband, Steve, she must leave the material world under the protection of her best friend, Stacia, along with Grace Brannagh, another former Promethea. With New York under relative control—even with the mayor being possessed by legions of demons and the FBI beginning to investigate Promethea—Sophie is able to find Barbara and begin their journey through the planes of existence to find her husband. 

More than the previous volume, this part of the Promethea mythos plays with the overall structure of the story itself. While things like the physical panel layout in issue 15 showcase much of that, it’s how these ideas blend into the various paths Sophie and Barbara take while trying to find Steve in the Immateria. We’re given a map similar to London’s Underground fairly early on in this volume and that gives us an opportunity to see just how they’re traveling from one realm to the next.

But, like any metro system, it’s never as direct as you want it. This is the point. Promethea as a series is a means for Moore to explain many of the magical concepts he’s studied throughout the decades and much of that comes in the form of these different paths and what they mean outside of just the story. Combined with the tarot and the writings of Aleister Crowley and Austin Spare, there’s an inter-connectedness that links individual feelings like trauma, grief, strength, splendor, and a host of others with the higher planes our characters must pass through.

The journey itself is long and isn’t finished with this one volume as we need to understand every realm and path to fully grasp Moore’s philosophy behind the series. In breaking the path between volumes, we get that feeling that this path he’s putting us on isn’t something that can be finished in a single sitting. 

Seeing a series two decades after its initial publication is interesting on its own—namely in how from production down it doesn’t feel like it’s older than maybe five years—but seeing how little in mainstream comics felt like this series afterward shows how singular of a story Promethea continues to be. 

Get excited. Get walking.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.