“Something is Killing the Children.” The words appear scratched on the cover of each issue in stark white lines as if carved in warning. The grim phrase – long for a title, but delivered without over-emphasis or even an exclamation point – sets the tone immediately for this unflinching tale about childhood monsters that are not quite imaginary.
Making Its Way to Film
“Something is Killing the Children” is the first series in James Tynion IV’s “Slaughterverse” which is expanded in “House of Slaughter”, “Books of Slaughter” and others (including an upcoming crossover with the ubiquitous horror comic Icon Swamp Thing). It is an award winning tale that was originally optioned by Netflix for development by Michael Flanagan into a project that never materialized – but those rights have just changed hands to Blumhouse who have indicated they are interested in producing a film and adult animated series.
It will of course take time for these projects to be completed, and there’s still a chance for them to stall out. But whatever happens with Blumhouse’s rights, this award winning comic is worth a read for fans of monsters and monster hunters in a world where meaning well and doing good are often far, far apart.
Rooted In The Supernatural
Issue one of “Something is Killing the Children” starts with a ghost story told during a game of truth or dare. We open on a small group of teenage boys in the blue tinged dark of a late night living room – with a boy named James telling the others that he saw a monster in the woods behind the house. Even as he describes it we know what the next steps will be, and the story suddenly flashes to the same boy in a painfully lit interrogation room explaining that he had made it up – he had lied about seeing anything in the first place. But now his friends are dead; the latest in a series of children that have gone missing or been found dead in the local community. The police have no idea how to handle it and some in the community start to blame James – and then Erica Slaughter arrives.
The Order of Saint George
Erica is a member of the “Order of Saint George” – monster hunters who travel North America to find and kill the horrible creatures that only children can see. The monsters are invisible to adults, but their carnage isn’t – and only Erica’s order-granted rituals let her retain her ability to see them too. The idea of a monster eating children is not a new trope, but the series gives us unflinching views not just at the terror of the creatures’ young victims but also their suffering. As the title so starkly suggests, children are dying, and we are not spared the details of these deaths by convenient cut-aways or panels depicting only the shadow of what is occurring. We see the bloodshed through Erica’s large, green eyes, and the frankness of the violence allows us to empathize with our protagonist’s pain and frustration when she isn’t able to stop it.
The Order is Not All Benevolent
Erica as a character struggles not only with the monsters themselves, but with the rules and brutal morality (or lack thereof) of the organization that empowers her to hunt them in the first place. She could not do her work without the Order’s magic, but the organization is ruthless in protecting not just the secret of its identity, but the existence of monsters all together – and eliminates any bystanders it sees as a threat. Erica can’t bring herself to live that way, but we are shown over and over again the consequences of her hesitation – sparing individuals that know too much, only for the consequence of that decision to wreak more havoc in the future. The reader wants Erica’s morality to prove true, wants to see that mercy and compassion are not weakness – which makes it all the more heartbreaking when those qualities cost even more lives, and we see what that does to Erica.
Bleak, Raw, Visceral… Beautiful
Tynion’s heartbreakingly bleak storytelling is core to the experience of “Something is Killing the Children”, but it is further elevated by the art of Werther Dell’Edera. Dell’Edera’s style for the series is surprisingly colorful for the genre, with even scenes in dark spaces frequently portrayed in blues and teals – it is usually only when encountering the varied types of child-killing monsters that the panels fill with black and red with jagged hash lines implying panic and confusion. Light is used as well – in one notable flashback scene where a young Erica speaks with a patriarch character in a golden mask, the panels are lit by yellow firelight. When the character leaves, the light begins to fade to reds and grays despite no actual change in the light’s SOURCE. The yellow afterglow persists though as Erica and her mentor discuss what the golden-masked character said, only disappearing entirely when they move on to another subject.
The art plays with identity as well, especially in the monster hunters. Erica wears an oversized green military jacket in most scenes, a high collar obscuring her lower face, and has her hair falling over one of her distinctive bright green eyes (all hunters have bright, colorful eyes as a result of the ritual that lets them see the monsters). Despite the fact that these elements seem to be trying to conceal her, she is generally honest – if blunt – and even friendly in her cynical way.
But when she prepares to battle a monster, she drops the coat, pulls her hair back and dons her order’s signature black mask with white teeth. Without the coat the lines of her body are sharp and thin, her bare arms crisscrossed with scars that reflect the cross-hatching artstyle the monsters are designed in. She ends most fights covered in blood, and along with the mask and her long knives the transformation creates a visual similarity between herself and the monsters she fights. As Erica struggles to do her job without losing her humanity, Dell’Edera’s art shows us the monster that she’s trying to keep contained.
Expanding the Universe
“Something is Killing the Children” and its spin off series have already sold over four million copies worldwide and won four Eisner awards. Despite the rights languishing with Netflix for nearly four years before they passed to Blumhouse, the “Slaughterverse” has been gaining popularity this whole time – which seems only likely to continue when “Swamp Thing is Killing the Children”, the DC and BOOM crossover that sees Erica and Swamp Thing in the same book (don’t worry, Tynion has confirmed that despite the title, Swamp Thing isn’t ACTUALLY killing the children) comes out in 2026. But until then, there’s plenty to catch up on, so get reading!