The longer people hold on to the idea that Alan Moore defines intelligence and quality in comics, the harder it will be for writers of equivalent magnitude to take their place alongside him. The field of comics is small enough that it’s only got room for one genius writer, so for now Grant Morrison and Pete Milligan and Ed Brubaker and Jason Aaron have to stand to one side for the big beardy miserablist. And now another writer has come up with a work of ferocious intelligence easily the equal of anything that Moore has done.

I’d come across Mike Carey before, and checked out a collection of his Lucifer series for Vertigo, which didn’t do anything for me. Reheated Gaimanisms from what I could see. Then I started hearing good things about The Unwritten, the first collected edition of which has just appeared. And it’s good. Better than good. Carey wrote it, and Peter Gross provides art which relishes body language and sets the tone perfectly.

Fiercely intelligent, and fun with it, The Unwritten is a classic case of having your cake and eating it. Centred on Tom Taylor, a young man who was the model for his father’s fantasy character Tommy Taylor, the story explores the intersection of the father’s fictional milieu, reader response to it in the form of fan websites and conventions, and the nature of fiction itself. Hey, you can’t fault Carey for lacking imaginative ambition.

Tom’s life is deeply entrenched in fiction, having been brought up with encyclopedic knowledge of how real locations and fictional events dovetail. His version of the world is equal parts raw sensory experience and literary history, and there’s a psychogeographical aspect to the story that accelerates when Taylor travels to the Swiss castle he was partly raised in, also the birthplace of Milton’s Satan and Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The comic is similarly rich, layering a well-paced adventure story that sees Taylor attempting to unravel the truth about himself: can he even rely on his belief that he’s the child of his parents, or was he adopted? Alongside that drama, there’s a wider picture unfolding which seems to involve genuinely magical forces. And a kind of postscript to the first storyline suggests the battle lines of this conflict were drawn a long time ago, and involved Rudyard Kipling for one.

This is a story that could only have been written by someone who’s been writing for some time: the meditations on writing, awareness of industry types, and sheer knowledge of the field says as much. And I’m glad that it’s delivered by a creator who works in comics: the pulp roots of the form, and the conventions which Carey abides by, make the story a lot more fun than it might have been in the hands of an overly serious prose writer. Or maybe it’s just me that found Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum ponderous and dull compared to the fleet science fiction take on much the same stuff peddled by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea in their Illuminatus trilogy.

Tremendously enjoyable, the effect of The Unwritten is like reading a fantasy comic that’s got its own built-in publishing history and fan response, all wrapped up in the same issue. If you’ve got any interest at all in how fiction comes into being, the interplay of life and art, how readers respond to texts for good and otherwise, then The Unwritten will appeal to you immensely. Speak it quietly, but the text parts of Watchmen were kind of dull, and that pirate stuff was like being hit over the head with a blunt metaphor: here, the different strands combine to create a web you’ll love being part of, and will want to return to.