Music is magic. The premise of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s comic Phonogram sounds simple. But over 10 years and three volumes, it’s proved an elegant, flexible, and amusing metaphor for fandom, and how it sweeps our lives up and carries them along. In Phonogram, fans aren’t just fans, they’re phonomancers—people whose obsession with music is so intense it works as a kind of magical power. Sickened by a scene you love getting picked over by retro vultures? In the world of Phonogram, you might go on a mystical journey to kill the music’s presiding spirit. Setting up a fanzine or club night? Phonogram characters form covens. And if you’ve ever longed to reinvent yourself through music and become something cooler, spare a thought for Phonogram’s Emily Aster. She was offered a Faustian pact by a being lurking behind the screen of '80s pop videos – half her personality for the chance to become the fabulous creature she always dreamed of. The Immaterial Girl, Phonogram’s third volume—returning this week through Image Comics following a half-decade hiatus—is the story of what happens when she regrets the deal.

-=-=-=-If all this magical baggage is putting you off, it works better on the page than in summary. Phonogram tends to wear its fantastical elements lightly, letting the metaphor do its work in the background. The comic’s heart is slice-of-life stories about music fans and the arguments and passions which drive them. In 2006’s Rue Britannia, the creators’ breakthrough work, Gillen savagely worked through his feelings about Britpop and its heritage. And in 2010’s The Singles Club, a tightly plotted series retelling one club night from multiple angles, magic barely figured. It’s closer to the surface of The Immaterial Girl—McKelvie draws a splendid, creepy sequence with Emily sucked into a classic video. But the heart of the issue is people in their twenties, then their thirties, adoring music, and paying a price for it.

It’s easy to relate to. Gillen is a former music and games journalist, writing with an intimate knowledge of obsessive fandom, and the ways it can distort your personality and swallow your time. Obsessives like Phonogram’s cast aren’t always admirable, and the first issue made me laugh and squirm equally. It’s a beguiling, funny comic with bleakness round the edges. Phonogram, the writer explains in the comic’s editorial, is a story about aging. We may not all have sold our personalities, but there comes a point where the investments you made in music require serious evaluation.

Gillen and McKelvie have fans of their own these days—their other comic about pop culture and fantasy, The Wicked and the Divine, has been a deserved success, and the two creators are conscientious about using social media to keep in touch with fans, posting cosplay photos from conventions, openly discussing artistic choices, and reblogging fan art. "WicDiv"’s story of superstar gods focuses on performers and creators, but in a way, it’s Phonogram that ought to be more accessible. We’re all fans of something.