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There is a Rat King on the cover of TMNT 27, and IDW will not say which one he is

By ninjaturtles.tv news desk

There is a Rat King on the cover of TMNT 27, and IDW will not say which one he is

Who is that supposed to be?

IDW gave AIPT the first look at Cover B for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 27 on Tuesday morning. The figure on it is wrapped head to foot in grubby bandages, his hide is stitched together in panels, his hair is a red-orange tangle and his eyes burn red in a fanged face. Five black rats with the same red eyes ride across his shoulders, and a sixth hangs from his fingers by the tail. Leonardo is swinging out of the bottom of the frame with both swords crossed and his attacker is coming over the top of him. It is a fine piece of monster drawing by Godtail. [1]

The trouble is that the IDW universe already has a Rat King, and he does not look like this. He is lean where this one is massive, his face is a bare white skull rather than a jaw full of teeth, he sits still in black robes with his limbs bound in wrappings, and the rats come to him rather than crawl on him. He is at the top of this page, on his throne, introducing himself to Leonardo in the run IDW has been publishing since 2011; our Rat King entry runs the design history, and The Best of Rat King in our comics catalogue collects the issues that built him.

Asked about it, IDW would confirm only that the figure resembles the Rat King from the franchise’s history, while acknowledging that the villain’s existing version has a distinctly different appearance. The publisher said nothing else. There is no name under the art, no solicitation text to check it against, and nothing on the cover itself beyond the credits.

So the question is which Rat King this is. Every answer to it costs the publisher something. A second Rat King running loose in a book that already has one needs explaining. A redesign of the one they have needs explaining harder, since his look is the thing fans know him by. Or the cover is a poster rather than a scene. Variant covers are allowed to be posters, and then the cover is advertising a fight that never happens. IDW has declined to say which, and declining is a reasonable thing to do four months out.

Matthew Rosenberg and Juann Cabal take the flagship over with issue 25 in January 2027, and when Rosenberg laid out his plans in July he described a run built on the Mirage template: street level, set in a New York you can recognise block by block, with the Turtles hunted across it by the biggest villain roster he can get his hands on. Issue 27 is the third chapter of that. A villain the run has to introduce or reintroduce in its opening months is what he told us to expect, and Godtail has drawn one four months ahead of the issue.

IDW told Fangoria this month that an imprint-wide horror push called IDW Goes Dark runs through next year with the Turtles in it, and no Turtles title, creative team or month has been attached to it yet. A stitched corpse of a thing with rats living in his bandages would not look out of place in IDW Goes Dark either.

What you can buy today

Not issue 27, which has no listing anywhere yet. MyComicShop’s series page stops at issue 24, and that one is listed without stock. [2] The newest one you can order is issue 23, Gene Luen Yang and Fero Pe’s “The City That Never Dies” chapter where the undead Foot Clan and Purple Dragons come for the city, and all five of its covers were in at $4.99 when we read the listing this morning. Yang and Fero Pe are finishing their run. Rosenberg’s has not started.

Footnotes

  1. The credits printed on the cover are Matthew Rosenberg, Juann Cabal and Luis Antonio Delgado, with the cover itself signed by Godtail and marked Cover B at $4.99 US.
  2. MyComicShop listing read at 08:30 ET on 14 October 2026. Issues 25, 26 and 27 do not appear on the series page at all.

Sources

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