Both 4 November Joe books got their covers four days after the order window shut

The date that decides whether a reader gets a copy of a comic is never the one printed on the cover. Skybound, Image, Hasbro and Crystal Dynamics put out a first look this morning at G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero/Tomb Raider #2 and at M.A.S.K. #6, with new covers, preview interiors and a shared on-sale date of 4 November. Both books look terrific, and both arrive four days after the 12 October final order cutoff, the day every shop’s order for them stopped being changeable.

Issue two picks up where the crossover premiere left off, and the whole team is back: Kyle Higgins writing, Elena Casagrande on art, Alex Guimaraes on colours, Pat Brosseau lettering. Skybound’s own solicitation copy opens “YO…LARA CROFT!” and sends Lara, Shipwreck and a G.I. Joe battalion onto Cobra Island by land, sea and air, racing Destro and his Iron Grenadiers to a puzzle that has been sitting down there for decades. Casagrande’s cover A puts Lara in the front of the frame with Snake-Eyes drawing a sword behind her and Shipwreck in his watch cap at her shoulder, and the corner box reads 2, NOV, $4.99 [1].

Sweeney Boo has the open-to-order cover B at $4.99 and a foil version of it at $5.99. The two incentives are Chris Mooneyham at 1:25 and Ito at 1:50, and Lunar files Mooneyham’s under the name “Vintage Joe Var”. We said the same of his covers on release morning, because he is drawing this crossover as though it shipped in 1985, caption boxes and all.

The cutoff was Monday, 12 October

A comic’s final order cutoff is the day a shop’s order stops being a guess and becomes a bill. For both of these books it fell on 12 October, so the print run was settled before anyone outside Skybound had seen a cover, and nothing announced this morning can move an extra copy into the system. What a reader can buy on 4 November is whatever their shop ordered in the second week of October.

A shop further afield that orders deep is the way round that, and Third Eye Comics, the retailer we read on the morning issue one went on sale, is still listing every open cover of both books at cover price, which covers Casagrande and both Sweeney Boos on the crossover, and Parr, Kerschl and the Bradshaw and Charalampidis cover on M.A.S.K.; every one of them reads in stock this morning. Both incentives are sitting there too, but at the shop’s own prices rather than at the cover price [2].

The distributor record makes both incentives look like a bargain, and they are not. Lunar prints a retail figure of $4.99 against Mooneyham’s 1:25 and Ito’s 1:50, and $3.99 against the two M.A.S.K. incentives, so a reader who stops there will think a 1:50 variant costs four dollars. It does not, because an incentive costs the shop cover price and the shop then prices it against the pile it had to order to earn one, so the same Mooneyham cover that Lunar lists at $4.99 sits at $24.99 on the shelf.

M.A.S.K. #6 cover A by Pye Parr: a red sports car sliding across an ice-covered road with burning pines behind it and a jet diving overhead, under the M.A.S.K. logo and a corner box reading number six

Pye Parr’s cover A for M.A.S.K. #6. Cover art: Skybound and Image Comics.

M.A.S.K. closes its arc, and does it at the old price

M.A.S.K. #6 closes the story arc, according to Lunar’s own record, and Dan Watters, Pye Parr, Pierluigi Casolino and Rus Wooton take Matt Trakker into the full force of V.E.N.O.M. to do it. We covered the January solicitation that puts issue eight on the schedule, and the streetwear variants on issue seven before that.

Parr’s cover prints $3.99 in its corner box and the distributor record says the same, while the licensed crossover shipping beside it that day carries $4.99. Karl Kerschl’s cover B is a connecting cover, so the picture on it only resolves once a reader has the rest of the run beside it.

Ito's 1:50 incentive cover for G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero/Tomb Raider #2: a watercolour of Lara Croft with twin pistols in front of Snake-Eyes drawing his sword, against a split red and white ground

Ito’s 1:50 incentive for issue two, the one cover of the five our shop does not list. Cover art: Skybound and Image Comics.

The second printing we cannot confirm

Skybound’s announcement, as Graphic Policy carries it, says a second printing of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero/Tomb Raider #1 arrives on the same 4 November date with a new cover by Annie Wu. We could not stand it up anywhere else this morning. There is no Lunar record for it that we could find, no shop listing, and no second outlet carrying the line, none of which is strange for a reprint announced a few hours ago, so we are carrying it as Skybound’s claim until a record turns up.

A second printing usually means a book sold through, and our own piece on issue one guessed it would happen. But the first printing is still sitting at Third Eye in all four of its open covers, nine days after it went on sale [3]. Both things can be true, because a book sells out at the distributor long before it sells out at a shop that over-ordered, and a reprint is aimed squarely at the shops that did not over-order; a reader who wants issue one today does not need to wait for Wu’s cover.

Ring the shop, ask what they put down on 12 October, and if the answer is nothing, start phoning the ones that order deep. Our comics archive carries the wider A Real American Hero run in the meantime. The first look is lovely; the order form closed on Monday.

Sources

Cover and interior art: Skybound and Image Comics. Prices, order dates and stock states read first hand off the distributor and retailer listings on the morning of 16 October 2026.

[1] Lunar’s own records for the nine covers all read the same two dates: a final order cutoff of 12 October 2026 and an in-store date of 4 November 2026. The crossover codes run 0926IM0360 to 0926IM0364 and the M.A.S.K. codes run 0926IM0399 to 0926IM0403, every one of them a 32-page book.

[2] Read off the shop’s own listings on the morning of 16 October. Mooneyham’s 1:25 was $24.99 and Lafuente’s 1:50 on M.A.S.K. was $49.99. Ito’s 1:50 on the crossover was not listed at all. A shop earns one of those by ordering fifty.

[3] Covers A, B, the Sejic foil and the blank sketch board all read in stock when we checked. Those are the same four that were available on release morning.