History ComicBook / TheChildrensCrusadeVertigo

* PoorlyDisguisedPilot: The back half of the miniseries, in which Tim Hunter is recruited to the Free Country, serves as a reintroduction for the character in advance of his ongoing series.

One fine spring day in the tiny English hamlet of Flaxdown, every child suddenly goes missing, save for Avril Mitchell, who happened to be away that day. With her little brother Oliver missing and her parents frantic, Avril takes it upon herself to hire a detective, but being only a child and thus having little money, she is forced to hire ComicBook/{{the Dead Boy Detectives}}, Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine. Rowland and Paine soon discover the Free Country, a secret realm populated entirely by ageless children, whose leaders now intend to take every child on Earth into its refuge after luring in five of the world's most powerful children: the young Black Orchid known as Suzy, Animal Man's daughter Maxine Baker, junior Doom Patrol member Dorothy Spinner, Swamp Thing's daughter Tefé Holland, and magical prodigy Timothy Hunter.

One fine spring day in the tiny English hamlet of Flaxdown, every child suddenly goes missing, save for Avril Mitchell, who happened to be away that day. With her little brother Oliver missing and her parents frantic, Avril takes it upon herself to hire a detective, but being only a child and thus having little money, she is forced to hire ComicBook/{{the Dead Boy Detectives}}, Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine. Rowland and Paine soon discover the Free Country, a secret realm populated entirely by ageless children, whose leaders now intend to take every child on Earth into its refuge.

* AnimalisticAbomination: Jack Rabbit looks like a creepy mix between a realistic rabbit and a cartoon. [[spoiler:It turns out he's not actually a rabbit, but a slaver in disguise.]]

* ChildrensCovertCoterie: The Free Country, an entire secret realm founded by children who went missing during the Children's Crusade and populated by other children they've rescued from terrible situations over the centuries (some of their denizens were slaves, at least one was a victim of the Holocaust, and another was a sexual abuse survivor). The story sees this secret realm suddenly escalating its efforts to "rescuing" whole villages of children from the normal world, convinced that some terrible danger is imminent, which results in Dorothy Spinner, Tefe Holland, Tim Hunter, and Maxine Baker getting taken and the Dead Boy Detectives trying to find the Free Country and bring all the missing children home.

* DependingOnTheWriter: One of the reasons the event fell apart was that there was little to no coordination between the creative teams on the tie-in issues, leading to a lot of inconsistencies. For example, the ''Animal Man'' issue only has Maxine going off to the Free Country at the end of the issue, whereas the ''Swamp Thing'' tie-in has her teaming up on an adventure with Tefe Holland and the ''Doom Patrol'' tie-in has her fighting with the Wild Girls, and neither of these events feature in Gaiman and Kwitney's new middle section in the collected edition, in which Maxine spends most of the story on her own. The ''Swamp Thing'' annual also portrays Peter Puck as a boy, whereas the bookend issues reveal that Peter was actually a girl named Mary.

* AdaptationalKarma: [[spoiler:The storyline as originally printed ended with the slaver who disguised himself as Jack Rabbit getting away after all he had done, with Edwin and Charles talked into letting him go on the grounds that he's no longer a threat to Free Country. In the 2015 hardcover collection ''Free Country: A Tale of the Children's Crusade'', one of the revisions made to the story is that the slaver instead gets successfully captured by Edwin and Charles and is subsequently imprisoned.]]

* AdaptationalKarma: [[spoiler:The storyline as originally printed ended with the slaver who disguised himself as Jack Rabbit getting away after all he had done, with Edwin and Charles talked into letting him go on the grounds that he's no longer a threat to Free Country. In the 2015 hardcover collection, one of the revisions made to the story is that the slaver instead gets successfully captured by Edwin and Charles and is subsequently imprisoned.]]

* ReCut: The series received a hardcover collection in 2015 that made several revisions. Aside from the aforementioned AdaptationalKarma, the most notable changes are the omission of the Annual issues from other Vertigo series that tied in to the event, a new middle chapter being added to bridge the gap between the two bookend issues and the concluding chapter adding a prologue where Avril Mitchell worries about her missing brother Oliver.

* AnArmAndALeg: One of Wat's hands was chopped off for stealing when he was a child slave. It's one of the things that has made him bitter towards adults.

* DirtyKid: Junkin Buckley is a little pervert who dreams of turning the Free Country into his own personal harem.

* AdaptationalKarma: [[spoiler:The storyline as originally printed ended with the slaver who disguised himself as Jack Rabbit getting away. In the 2015 hardcover collection, one of the revisions made to the story is that the slaver instead gets successfully captured by Edwin and Charles and is subsequently imprisoned.]]

* AdaptationalKarma: [[spoiler:The original storyline as printed ended with the slaver who disguised himself as Jack Rabbit getting away. In the 2015 hardcover collection, one of the revisions made to the story is that the slaver instead gets successfully captured by Edwin and Charles and is subsequently imprisoned.]]

* CanonWelding: While it may not be an intentional example, Flaxdown Manor, where Charles and Edwin encounter Jumping Joan, is near-identical to the unnamed abandoned manor in Likely Stories, the 2016 comic book adaptation of four short stories from Gaiman's 2006 anthology Fragile Things.

One fine spring day in the tiny English hamlet of Flaxdown, every child suddenly goes missing, save for Avril Mitchell, who happened to be away that day. With her little brother Oliver missing and her parents frantic, Avril takes it upon herself to hire a detective, but being only a child and thus having little money, she is forced to hire the Dead Boy Detectives, Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine. Rowland and Paine soon discover the Free Country, a secret realm populated entirely by ageless children, whose leaders now intend to take every child on Earth into its refuge.

''The Children's Crusade'' was a 1993 crossover event spearheaded by Creator/NeilGaiman and Alisa Kwitney that brought together five of Creator/{{Vertigo}}'s superhero books - ''ComicBook/BlackOrchid'', ''ComicBook/AnimalMan'', ''ComicBook/DoomPatrol'', ''ComicBook/SwampThing'', and ''ComicBook/TheBooksOfMagic'', with the annuals for each series holding a different part of the crossover (except for ''Books of Magic'', as the original miniseries had ended and the eventual ongoing had not yet begun.)

!!This miniseries contains examples of:

* WellIntentionedExtremist: The denizens of the Free Country only want to save children from harm and abuse, and think that they can offer refuge to all children, but being only children themselves, they don't understand that their actions have serious consequences. [[spoiler:They also don't know that Jack Rabbit and Junkin Buckley are manipulating them for their own ends.]]

* NoPeriodsPeriod: Averted; Dorothy Spinner is recruited by the Free Country, who hope to use her reality-warping powers to expand their borders, but she happens to be on her period that day and thus is deemed too old.

* SweetPollyOliver: One of the emissaries from the Free Country,

''Children's Crusade'' was a 1993 crossover event spearheaded by Creator/NeilGaiman and Alisa Kwitney that brought together five of Creator/{{Vertigo}}'s superhero books - ''ComicBook/BlackOrchid'', ''ComicBook/AnimalMan'', ''ComicBook/DoomPatrol'', ''ComicBook/SwampThing'', and ''ComicBook/TheBooksOfMagic'', with the annuals for each series holding a different part of the crossover (except for ''Books of Magic'', as the original miniseries had ended and the eventual ongoing had not yet begun.)