Something Is Killing the Children's Slaughterverse is about to explode in popularity

The 'Slaughterverse' has been reformatted for Webtoon, just one more step in the comic's cultural takeover

On the horizon: A prose novel, a crossover with DC’s Swamp Thing, and both a movie and animated series produced by Blumhouse. But the clearest indication that Something Is Killing the Children has made a pop-culture impact is a recent jump to Webtoon, where Erica lives alongside Batman, Avatar Aang, and the million manga that made the site a name. Tynion IV and Dell'Edera’s original run of the comic launched on the platform on April 20, with seven comics free to read an additional nine currently loaded up in the app’s FastPass subscription (with new issues going free each Tuesday).

The conversion of Something Is Killing the Children to the vertical-scroll experience of Webtoon might be Tynion’s most surreal experiment: a comic famous for oppressive atmosphere and splash pages soaked in monster blood has been reformatted into the smartphone-native vertical format popularized by manhwa readers. Chapters that had ultra-wide frames spread across two pages has now been stacked on top of itself.

According to Tynion, who spoke to Polygon earlier this month, the transition ended up feeling surprisingly natural, a testament to the duo’s prioritization of emotional beats through — let’s face it — horrifying carnage.

“There are a lot of storytelling techniques that in my scripts and in Werther’s paneling of the pages come from more manga-style storytelling,” Tynion told Polygon. “We have a lot of closeup reaction shots. We step out every single moment. We don’t usually have six characters talking to each other in a single panel. We normally break that into smaller beats.”

Settling into the “alternative” comics space (compared to the legacies of Marvel and DC) also feels right to Tynion considering Erica Slaughter’s relationship to superheroes. While the character has clear DNA from costumed vigilantes and horror icons, the writer sees her less as a traditional American comics hero and more as a synthesis of his East-meets-West obsessions.

“I came of age during the manga boom in the early 2000s,” Tynion said. “My range of influences are, it wasn’t just superhero comics. It was superhero comics, it was manga. It was actually a lot of shojo manga, romance.”

That blend of influences helped shape Erica into a very different kind of long-form genre protagonist. She’s not Batman with knives. “She embodies this kind of endurance in the face of insurmountable odds, which is very true to superhero work. But even from the first storyline on, we see her sometimes make the wrong decision to disastrous results.”

That flexibility has become increasingly important as Something Is Killing the Children mutates from indie horror hit into something much larger. Tynion described the process of iterating on Erica’s core story past the original miniseries like developing a long-running movie franchise where each chunk of story has its own emotional architecture.

“I view every sort of 15-issue chunks of Something Is Killing the Children as a kind of single Erica Slaughter novel,” he said. Tynion compared her to Hercule Poirot — a figure carrying readers into the next story, but entering other people’s tragedies rather than dominating every scene herself.

It’s a structure that suddenly makes the Webtoon leap make even more sense. The Slaughterverse increasingly operates less like a traditional monthly comic and more like the kind of endlessly expanding genre saga that thrives online. Which is funny, considering the whole thing started with a title Tynion came up with in college ages ago.

“The story wasn’t any good,” he admitted. “But I knew that the title had a bit of a punch to it.”