Midnight Fantastic Four #4: New Artist, Release Date and Covers

A change of artist is not a detail in a series whose visual identity was set from issue #1. The fourth issue of Midnight Fantastic Four is the one where the reader's mental inking has to readjust: the same characters, the same writer, a different line.

As always in this guide, we only state verified information (creators, issue numbers, dates); the analysis is our own, with no reproduction of interior pages or protected dialogue.

Issue #4 at a glance

Here is what Marvel has made public about this issue, with the caveats that apply to anything not yet released. To date, the fourth issue rests only on a publisher announcement, with issue #1 the only one out.

• Announced release: January 20, 2027, in the middle of the line's three fourth issues.
• Script: Benjamin Percy, as since the start of the series.
• Interior art: Marcelo Ferreira. This is the change in this issue.
• Cover A: Kev Walker, whose illustration stays hidden until purchase.
• Format: 32 pages, Parental Advisory rating, versus 40 pages for issue #1.
• First appearances: none is announced for this issue.

The solicitation reuses the subtitle "Finding the Hidden World!", already attached to the previous issue: the fourth issue therefore directly extends the expedition into the desert rather than opening a new cycle. For a collector, that is useful information in itself, since it signals that the art handoff happens in the middle of a narrative movement and not at a clean boundary between two arcs.

Who is Marcelo Ferreira

Marcelo Ferreira is an artist whose track record is easier to read than you might think if you follow licensed comics. His career before Marvel runs through series tied to existing universes: Call of Duty: Black Ops III and Back to the Future, two titles cited when Marvel introduced him to the public. That background counts: drawing a license means staying faithful to familiar faces and settings while keeping the storytelling clear, two qualities that a horror series with several iconic characters needs precisely.

He arrived at Marvel in 2019 with the Morbius series, written by Vita Ayala, whose announcement named him as the artist. The choice was not trivial: Morbius is a scientist-vampire character, on the edge between horror and superheroes, which prepares the ground fairly directly for a series like Midnight Fantastic Four. In October 2019, at New York Comic Con, Marvel announced that Marcelo Ferreira was signing an exclusive agreement with the publisher. He said at the time that he had been working with Marvel for twelve months and was delighted by the offer.

More recently, he drew Predator vs. Spider-Man, a four-issue miniseries whose first issue came out on April 23, 2025. It was written by Benjamin Percy, who had just done other Predator encounters with Marvel heroes, notably with Wolverine. In other words, the duo behind issue #4 of Midnight Fantastic Four has already worked together on a story in which a creature stalks Marvel characters in an urban setting. This shared work already done argues for a smooth transition: Benjamin Percy knows the line of the artist taking over the interior.

We will not venture to describe his style beyond these benchmarks. An artist is judged on the pages, and to our knowledge no interior page of issue #4 has been shown. The point for you is to judge on the art the day of release, not to prejudge how it will look.

What the artist change means for the series

At the line's panel at New York Comic Con, Kev Walker was present alongside Benjamin Percy and colorist Frank D'Armata, and the pages shown were for issue #2. For issue #4, the solicitation credits Marcelo Ferreira with the interior art and reserves the cover for Kev Walker. Marvel has not detailed the reasons for this arrangement, and we invent none.

What we can say without conjecture is what this arrangement implies for reading and for shelving:

• The series stays visually tied to Kev Walker through its A covers, including for issues drawn by someone else. A reader who only looks at covers will not see the break.
• The name on the cover is no longer the name inside. For this particular issue, you therefore need to record two distinct artists: the cover artist, Kev Walker, and the interior artist, Marcelo Ferreira.
• The colorist is not announced for issues #2 to #5. Frank D'Armata is credited on issue #1, and we do not attribute the following ones to him.

For a horror series, continuity of light and palette is a subject in its own right, because the atmosphere is built through contrast. This question will face the reader from the issue's first page, and it can only be settled by reading. Better, then, not to settle on a judgment of the whole series from the opening.

Artist handoffs, an old habit of the classic series

Changing artists along the way is nothing new for the Fantastic Four, and the classic series' history shows it. The series started in 1961 with Stan Lee on text and Jack Kirby on pencils. The last issue fully plotted and drawn by Kirby for the series is issue #102, dated September 1970, just before his departure from Marvel for DC, where he developed his Fourth World cycle. The baton then passed among several artists, including John Romita and John Buscema, which profoundly changed the perception of the series for several years.

Another milestone of a series that became inseparable from its writer-artists: John Byrne took over the title with issue #232, dated July 1981, as writer, artist and inker. In both cases, the comics collector learned the same lesson: the name of an issue's artist often determines a series' appeal for a given reader, sometimes more than the title itself.

The situation of Midnight Fantastic Four is more modest. It is not a spectacular departure, but a split of roles in which the cover artist stays identified with the series. It nonetheless fits the franchise's old logic: the series passes from hand to hand, and the successive artists are what lets readers, decades later, find their way to a specific issue. If you want to place Marcelo Ferreira among those who left a mark on the series, the Fantastic Four reading selection gives an entry point for comparison.

What the solicitation announces: a return without memories

Let us restate Marvel's text without quoting it. Returning from a monolith standing in the Jornada del Muerto, in New Mexico, the heroes have forgotten everything about their adventure. Their minds and bodies behave strangely, and the solicitation suggests the cause could be a cosmic artifact encountered there. The previous issue, titled "Finding the Hidden World!", took them into that desert, on the trail of another world left by a crack in the firmament.

Two things stand out in this text, and we can comment on them without speculating about the plot. First, the issue is built on a loss of information: the characters do not know what they lived through, and the reader knows no more until Marvel publishes it. Second, the phrase "maybe because of an artifact" is a hypothesis formulated by the solicitation itself, not a certainty: there is no reason to treat it as a fact of the story.

The place deserves a reminder, because it belongs to real history rather than fiction. The Jornada del Muerto is a desert region of New Mexico, and it is in this zone, near Los Alamos, that the 1945 atomic test took place. The story thus draws on a setting tied to the scientific memory of the twentieth century, which the announcement of the second issue, about a theory tied to the perils of the atomic age, already hinted at. Issue #4 is where the story seems to return from that setting, which makes it a pivot issue in the announced sequence, though we do not know what it contains.

For reading, it is a particular type of episode. A story where the characters have forgotten what they saw changes the artist's place: he has to make exist events that the text no longer describes, or describes only through their effects on faces and bodies. That it is precisely Marcelo Ferreira who takes over the interior at this moment is, for us, a point of attention for reading, and nothing more.

Issue #4 covers and variants

The solicitation lists five covers, all tied to the line's variant families:

• A: Kev Walker, veiled main cover.
• B: Declan Shalvey, Midnight Bloodbath family.
• C: Ben Harvey, Midnight Special family.
• D: Stonehouse, Midnight Horror Homage family.
• E: Mark Spears, Midnight Gallery family, with a ratio of 1 copy for every 25 ordered by the retailer.

No ratio is given for covers B, C and D. To grasp what a ratio means and how it weighs on a hunt, our page on the Midnight line variants covers the question.

Practical point: since cover A is veiled, and its announced artist could change, only enter the name definitively once you have the issue in hand. Note the word "announced" in your notes, then correct it on release day if the credit changes.

Cover E also illustrates another rule of caution: a variant artist is not a series artist. Mark Spears, for example, signs cover E of this issue, but has no announced role inside. Associating a variant illustrator's name with the whole series is a cataloging error, and that error is common as soon as a line multiplies its covers.

What a collector should check for this issue

Here is a checklist for anyone following the series issue by issue.

1. The date. January 20, 2027 is the announced date. Releases can shift; record the real date once the issue is on shelves.
2. The two artist credits. Cover A and interior are handled by two different people: record them separately.
3. The colorist and the letterer. Marvel has not indicated them for this issue. Leave those fields empty rather than copying the ones from issue #1.
4. The cover received. Check that the copy matches the expected letter, especially for covers B to E, which look alike under their bagging.
5. The place in the sequence. Issue #4 of this series must not be confused with the #4 issues of the line's two other titles, which come out a week apart.

This last point deserves emphasis. On January 13, 20 and 27, 2027, three fourth issues come out, all carrying the Midnight label, with veiled A covers and variants with identical names. Misfiling between titles is a frequent source of confusion when a line is launched as a trio.

Single issues and shelving: how to approach this handoff

Readers who prefer to wait for a collected edition have, for now, only the solicitations to go on, and we assume no future edition. For those reading the single issues, issue #4 holds particular interest: it is a convenient observation point for judging how the series holds up when the art changes, without the bias of launch novelty.

If you keep a binder by artist rather than by title, this issue goes in two sections: it joins the Midnight Fantastic Four series and Marcelo Ferreira's personal entry, which already counts the 2019 Morbius and the 2025 Predator vs. Spider-Man miniseries. One more issue in his Marvel artist bibliography files quite naturally next to those titles.

Frequently asked questions