The Children's Crusade was a 1993 crossover event spearheaded by Neil Gaiman and Alisa Kwitney that brought together five of Vertigo's superhero books - Black Orchid, Animal Man, Doom Patrol, Swamp Thing, and The Books of Magic, 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.)
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 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.
For the Marvel Comics story of the same name, see here.
The Children's Crusade (1993) contains examples of:
- Adaptational Karma: 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 any of their concern. 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.
- Amputative Sentencing: 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.
- Animalistic Abomination: Jack Rabbit looks like a creepy mix between a realistic rabbit and a cartoon. It turns out he's not actually a rabbit, but a slaver in disguise.
- Artistic License – History: The miniseries holds that the historical Children's Crusade of 1212 was actually made up of children, whereas most modern accounts believe that it was just another popular crusade that just happened to have more children than usual. The series also holds that the would-be crusaders reached Tunisia, whereas historians believe that the actual children ended up stranded in Marseilles or Brinidisi.
- Canon Welding: 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.
- Children's Covert Coterie: 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, Tefé 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.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Most of the residents of the Free Country are children who had difficult lives. The initial arrivals like Wat and Mary were all children who'd been sold into slavery during the Children's Crusade, while later arrivals included a dancing slave from Imperial Russia, a Holocaust victim, and a little girl who was sexually abused by her stepdad.
- Depending on the Writer: 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 Tefé 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.
- Dirty Kid: Junkin Buckley is a little pervert who dreams of turning the Free Country into his own personal harem. In particular, he complains that Mary isn't stripping all the way when she removes her Peter Puck get-up and at one point gropes Dorothy Spinner's breasts.
- Embarrassing Damp Sheets: In the Doom Patrol tie-in, Dorothy's first scene has her waking up complaining about her menstrual cramps and seeing that her bedsheets have been stained with period blood.
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: Lian is actually a normal human girl, but dresses herself up as a weird, doll-like creature because she's recruiting Dorothy Spinner, who is more used to dealing with weird beings than normal human children.
- I Want My Mommy!: Oliver Mitchell proclaims that he wants his mummy after seeing Maxine Baker and the hordes of animals following her.
- Lying Finger Cross: In the Black Orchid tie-in, Junkin Buckley crosses his fingers when he tells Suzy he meant every word of the poem he told her.
- Never Grew Up: Free Country is run by children who never age and stay young forever.
- No Periods, Period: 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 decides to leave after she needs a replacement pad but can't find any because none of the other kids are old enough to need them.
- Pervert Revenge Mode: When Junkin Buckley gropes Dorothy Spinner's breasts, she retaliates by punching him.
- Poorly Disguised Pilot: 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 John Ney Reiber's run on The Books of Magic.
- Re-Cut: The series received a hardcover collection in 2015 titled Free Country: A Tale of the Children's Crusade, in which several revisions were made to the original storyline. Aside from the aforementioned Adaptational Karma, 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.
- Sweet Polly Oliver: One of the emissaries from the Free Country, Peter Puck, is actually a girl named Mary.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: 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. They also don't know that Jack Rabbit and Junkin Buckley are manipulating them for their own ends.
- Witch with a Capital "B": In the Doom Patrol tie-in, when Dorothy Spinner retaliates to Junkin Buckley groping her breasts by punching him, Junkin Buckley responds by calling Dorothy a "goddamn ugly grown-up witch".
