I do suppose this is it. After five volumes in just as many weeks, we’ve finally come to the last volume of Promethea and have fully immersed ourselves in the world that’s been created for us. But has it really been created for us, or has it been here the whole time—a fiction hiding just beneath what we know to be real? Well, this is an Alan Moore script, so it’s been created for us in the same way that essay back in Book 1 duped me. But now it’s time to finally end Promethea with Book 5 by Moore, J.H. Williams III, Mick Gray, Jeromy Cox, Jose Villarrubia, and Todd Klein.

Sophie Bangs is having some more problems. After the events of the previous volume, she’s had to flee New York for the city of Millennium and take on an alias, Joey, to better hide from the FBI. It’s been years since she’s transformed into Promethea, but when confronted by the science-hero Tom Strong, she has no choice but to transform. This final transformation, however, begins the final countdown for the end of the world. Or, at least a kind of end of the world. The end of the world that we had known in the past as a new one that merges elements of the Immateria emerges instead. But in the moment, as the buildings of New York begin to warp and time begins to get convoluted and apparitions begin to appear in the streets, it does feel like the end.

The end for Promethea, though, is only a kind of beginning. While Sophie Bangs herself is transformed at the end of the story and has her own life, she admits that she no longer feels Promethea within her—the spirit is effectively gone from her. And it’s in the final issue of the series, this panel-less denouement, that we have the core of Moore’s philosophy presented to us. Where the penultimate issue has the past Prometheas talking about who can shepherd in this new era, the final issue is that shepherding. The spirit of Promethea, the one that Sophie inhabited and who finally was able to meet with her father after nearly two millennia, breaks down the nature of magic, imagination, and the connection between all of these philosophical concepts the series had been utilizing. But it isn’t a lecture on any of them, rather a lesson being shown to us by the very spirit of imagination that had brought them to comics in the first place.

Even with the story being definitively over, Promethea feels like something that sits continually within your mind. It’s a series that has become essential to the monthly comics medium despite being relatively obscure in conversations about modern graphic literature. It’s an Alan Moore story and even some of the comics people I talk to don’t know about it! But then there was another series, something that also delved into some of the philosophy of magic, that had a sequel series release around the same time from the same publisher. Maybe that’s something to talk about later.

Get excited. Get invisible.

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