A small wiry man in a black bodysuit, red shorts, brown loafers, white gloves with torn fingers exposing dirty, gnarly long nails, and wearing a cheap costume mask of a rat mascot.
Most Rat comics are a single issue or short story arc, beginning with The Rat shown out of costume but obscured so as to hide any identifying features, working some mundane job like dish washer or street maintenance worker. Other characters serve as the point of view character, and plot points not experienced from PoV are inferred through interactions with The Rat or through the consequences of his actions.
The Rat rarely speaks, so much of his background and motivation are unknown. Some revelations or implications are that he is an orphan, and as a child he was diagnosed with multiple speech, learning, and mental health disorders. Most of his stories center around the unhoused, especially sex workers and children.
He has a possibly superheruman ability to withstand and inflict suffering, although this may be an affectation of the storytelling and the perceptions of the PoV characters. He does not have any obvious combat training either. Compensating for his small size and lack of training is his tenacity; he often grapples around his larger foes, slashes with his nails, bites, and makes unsettling noises such as yells, grunts, or hisses to rattle his opponents. The art and action choreography is often presented as equal parts visceral gritty ultraviolence and clumsy, erratic, grotesquery.
While The Rat stories are often street-level, rooted in the real world and social issues, it is also not uncommon for them to explore literal or thematic Mythic Underworlds and supernatural elements.
Most stories end with The Rat seemingly dying in some gruesome or awful manner, with only a sliver of plausibility of him living to the next story, implying The Rat may be immortal, or that each story may actually be a different person embodying The Rat.
