Swamp Thing Is Killing the Children #1: the crossover with a title like a tabloid front page lurches into shops in December.

Some crossovers are the product of careful editorial planning. Others exist because somebody realised two titles could be bolted together into the best headline of the decade. Swamp Thing Is Killing the Children is, by James Tynion IV’s own account, a bit of both: he spent around two and a half years pitching it to DC. Now the first look is out, and the 64-page one-shot squelches into shops on 2 December, priced at $8.99.

It’s the first crossover for BOOM! Studios’ Slaughterverse, the horror line that grew out of Something Is Killing the Children, and Tynion is reunited with his co-creator Werther Dell’Edera on art. The story centres on two young brothers who love comics, the elder with a Swamp Thing poster on his bedroom wall. The younger is frightened of his brother’s horror books, and his fear brings a Swamp Thing-like monster to life, which is precisely the sort of thing that Erica Slaughter, monster hunter, bandana wearer and owner of the most alarming stuffed octopus in comics, exists to deal with. Tynion has promised that an essence of the true Alec Holland will turn up too, a phrase that anyone who has read Alan Moore’s “The Anatomy Lesson” will find loaded with irony.

It’s a clever bit of matchmaking. Swamp Thing has always been at his best as a horror comic rather than a superhero one, from Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson’s original stories through Moore’s run, and the Slaughterverse is built on the same idea: the monsters children are afraid of are real, and the grown-ups are no help at all. Dell’Edera’s scratchy, shadow-soaked art should suit a swamp very nicely indeed. The book is being published for mature readers, so this is not one to slip into a nephew’s Christmas stocking.

There’s a compost heap of variant covers to go with Dell’Edera’s main one, by Jenny Frison, Tyler Boss, Martín Morazzo, Francis Manapul, Álvaro Martínez Bueno, Hayden Sherman and Gabriele Dell’Otto, so completists should start saving now. Concerned parents, meanwhile, can relax. Despite the title, no actual children are being harmed by a walking peat bog. Probably.