Free country.

- Free country: A tale of the children’s crusade. Neil Gaiman, et. al. Overnight, the children of Flaxdown have disappeared without a trace —a phenomenon that is soon repeated in several places all over the world. Investigating the case are Rowland and Paine, detectives far more earnest than experienced, but who have a certain unique asset: they are both ghost children. Soon it becomes apparent that there is a massive conspiracy at play, involving millennia-old magic and five very special children en route to a place called Free Country. But is it a heaven for abused children or an altogether new kind of hell? 

This particular comic is something of a curiosity —not only for the high concept premise (which mixes real life tragedies like the infamous ‘Chidren’s crusade’ with the legend of the Pied Piper and a dash of “Childe Roland to the dark tower came”, plus even more ancient rhymes and fairytales), nor for the decidedly unique cast —but because it is the “collected edition” of a story that never truly was. 

You see, “The children’s crusade” was conceived circa 1992 as a crossover between the major Vertigo titles. It would involve the children of each ongoing book — Rowland and Paine from “The sandman” (and the spinoff “Dead boy detectives”), Maxine Baker from “Animal Man”, Dorothy Spinner from “Doom Patrol”, Tefé from “Swamp Thing”, Suzy from “Black Orchid” and Tim Hunter from “The books of magic”. Gaiman wrote two issues, the first by himself and the second with Alisa Kwitney and Jamie Delano, which were effectively the prologue and epilogue of the crossover. Each chapter would be covered in the Annuals for each of the other comic books. 

But… that didn’t quite happen. Most of the writers were simply uninterested in breaking their ongoing stories for the sake of an experimental crossover (to be fair, this gimmick has certainly become bloated in current times, particularly at DC and Marvel). 

Consequently, this edition features a completely new middle written by Toby Litt and Rachel Pollack, and between the three they make a coherent story… kind of. Truth be told, as a story it can be best described as “uneven”. For one thing, out of the seven intended protagonists, Dorothy is not really in the book at all, while Tefé is reduced to a couple pages-long cameo. Maxine is practically a villain because of her compressed character arc. Suzy, being left with very little to do, comes across as something of an airhead. Rowland and Paine solve the mystery pretty much by accident and then save the day thanks to a deus-ex-machina. And while Tim Hunter fares much better (he has a consistent personality and is the only one who both acts as an actual child and is actually smart enough to think before he acts), he essentially appears out of nowhere and then simply drops out of the story. 

Yet there is a lot to like here, particularly an extremely intriguing plot involving Freedom Land itself (and peopled by some truly disturbing villains). It is very tempting to imagine the entire story done again, this time without the baggage of needing to accommodate already-existing character beats and instead with characters made from scratch. 

There’s a writing prompt, for sure…