IDW is bringing horror to the Turtles across 2027, and the logo has been on a cover since June

Jake Thomas, the IDW senior group editor who looks after the Turtles, puts the start of this one on a wish list he wrote when he took over the books. The publisher told Fangoria on Monday morning that an imprint-wide push called IDW Goes Dark will run across the whole of 2027, with the Turtles in it alongside Sonic the Hedgehog, Hello Kitty, Godzilla and Star Trek, and new originals from the IDW Dark line beside them. No Turtles title has been named, no creative team has been named, and no month has been given. [1]

What IDW did put on the record is the reason. Thomas said this:

“I’m a big genre guy in general, but horror is my one true love. When I first took over TMNT, one of the first lines on my Turtles wish list was ‘horror story.’ So I’m thrilled to finally let go of some of my extreme jealousy and fomo over all the awesome work Heather and her crew are doing on IDW Dark by bringing the horror vibes over to TMNT, Godzilla, and Sonic.”

The Heather is Heather Antos, who runs IDW Dark and built it out of A Quiet Place and Smile and a run of originals. She says in the same announcement that one of her earliest memories is accidentally watching Stephen King’s It at nearly five years old, and that one of her first jobs was her local haunted house. Thomas has the Turtles, Antos has the horror line, and the announcement has them bringing one into the other.

None of which is a change of direction. It is a publisher agreeing with a book it has already been publishing that way since at least June.

The ongoing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has been running a storyline called The City That Never Dies, and Gene Luen Yang and Fero Pe have the veil between the living and the dead coming apart over New York, with the Foot Clan and the Purple Dragons coming back through it. IDW’s solicitation for issue 23 has the city going under and the brothers splitting up because there is no other way to cover the ground. [2] Before that came The Hunger, which brought Hun back through a green portal over a pool table and put Slash and Ninjara in front of him. Paul Allor keeps the hunger physical: a man back from the dead whose first complaint is that something inside him is nibbling.

Cover E of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 23 by Damien Worm: an undead Raphael, mask torn, claws himself up out of a muddy grave in the rain, with the IDW Goes Dark logo in the lower right corner.

Cover E of TMNT 23 by Damien Worm. Image: IDW Publishing.

Cover E of issue 23, by Damien Worm, was revealed in June, and it carries the IDW Goes Dark wordmark in its bottom right corner. The branding reached a Turtles book before it reached a press release! Raphael comes up out of grave mud in the rain on it, mask torn to a rag, jaw hanging open on a mouth of teeth no Turtle is usually drawn with; a second red-wrapped hand breaks the dirt at the right of frame, and an angel on a headstone holds a sword behind him in the downpour.

What you can read while you wait

The 2027 books do not exist yet, but the horror turn is already on the shelf. The Hunger is the closest thing to a sampler, a 36 page special by Allor, Gavin Smith and Luis Antonio Delgado, and MyComicShop has Covers A by Smith, B by Dev Madan and C by Chamba in at the $5.99 cover price in New. Igor Monti’s 1 in 10 retailer incentive is in as well, and a ratio cover carries a premium over cover price even in a lower grade: Near Mint is $7.99, Very Fine $6.39. Isobel Rees’ 1 in 25 is the scarcest cover in the set and MyComicShop no longer has one. Every row on that page was orderable when we read it on 30 September. [3]

Issue 23 is $4.99 and does not reach shops until the 14th, so nobody is holding stock of it yet. Worm’s Cover E is the one to ask a retailer for. It is a lettered cover rather than a retailer incentive, so a shop that ordered the issue should be able to get one without a ratio attached.

NYCC starts on Thursday and IDW has said there is more

IDW is at booth 4551 at New York Comic Con this week, and its panel, “IDW Publishing: You’ll Want to Be in This Room”, is on Friday 9 October from 11:15 am in North Room 406.2. The publisher has said it has at least one announcement for every weekday of show week, and it has named the Turtles among the fans getting news. Our NYCC 2026 page carries the schedule and a log we add to as each reveal lands.

So the question for Friday is not whether the Turtles get a horror comic. A cover went out in June with the logo on it, and that settled it. The question is whether the book turns out to be a special, a miniseries off to the side, or the ongoing itself, and IDW has not said. The ongoing is already running a story about the dead coming back.

Footnotes

[1] Fangoria carried the reveal as an exclusive on 5 October 2026, with cover art for A Quiet Place: Rising Tides, Any Given Smile and Event Horizon: Pandemonium, none of which are Turtles books. Graphic Policy ran IDW’s New York Comic Con release the same evening, naming the same franchises and adding the booth number and the panel slot. Neither names a TMNT title.

[2] Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 23, written by Gene Luen Yang with art by Fero Pe and colours by Delgado, on sale 14 October 2026, $4.99. The solicitation also has Baxter Stockman taking a new ally and Shinigami deciding where her allegiance sits.

[3] Read on MyComicShop on 6 October 2026. Stock on a retailer incentive moves quickly, and a want list entry is not a promise of a copy.

Sources

Our own coverage: TMNT: The Hunger is on sale and all five covers are orderable and NYCC 2026 for Ninja Turtles fans.