M.A.S.K. #1 is in its fourth printing, and the sources split on its release date

There are two dates in circulation for the first issue of the Skybound and Image series, and the desk has to admit that one of them is on our own comic page. Image’s announcement of 20 February 2026 gave the on-sale date as 3 June, and a Tformers write-up that repeats the press release says the same. By 2 April, when ICv2 posted its preview of the issue, the date was 10 June, and Bleeding Cool on 13 April, ICv2 again on 21 July and the Wikipedia article on the series all use 10 June as well. We have found no statement from Image or Skybound explaining the move, so the likeliest reading is that the date slipped by a week after the press release and the later sources are right, but that is our inference and not a published fact.

How it sold

The numbers people quote for this book deserve a note on how good each one is. Bleeding Cool’s Rich Johnston wrote on 13 April that the issue had launched with over 200,000 copies ordered by comic stores, and he credited the Energon Universe blind bag for much of that demand. The article names no distributor report or publisher statement for the figure, and it measures orders placed by shops, which is a different thing from copies sold to readers. Johnston himself says it would take until June to see whether the prediction held.

The later evidence is firmer. On 7 July Bleeding Cool published a ranking of Image’s top ten comics for June 2026 with M.A.S.K. #1 in first place and Skybound titles taking seven of the ten spots; the page gives an order and no sales figures, so it tells us the issue led and not by how much. Reprints are the other signal a publisher cannot easily fake. Bleeding Cool’s PrintWatch column of 6 August listed a third printing of issue one at $3.99 for 2 September, along with a second printing of issue three, and its column of 11 September listed a fourth printing of issue one beside a date of 7 October. The September column does not say outright that the date applies to that printing, so treat that date as probable.

What it means for collectors

A comic that keeps going back to press is good news for anyone who has just started reading, because the early issues stay easy to find at cover price, and it is mildly bad news for anyone hoping the first printing turns into a rarity. The cover gallery on our issue page lists covers A through R, the last of them the blind-bag cover, and the reprints are separate again. We will fix the release date on the issue entry once we have a source better than the weight of the later ones.

Sources

• Image Comics press release, “Image, Skybound & Hasbro Announce New Energon Universe Series M.A.S.K.”, February 2026 (on-sale date 3 June)
• Dennis Viau, “Preview: M.A.S.K. #1”, ICv2, 2 April 2026 (on-sale date 10 June)
• Rich Johnston, “Energon Universe’s M.A.S.K. #1 Gets 200,000 Orders From Comic Stores”, Bleeding Cool, 13 April 2026
• Rich Johnston, “M.A.S.K. #1 Tops The List Of Image Comics’ Top 10 Comics In June 2026”, Bleeding Cool, 7 July 2026
• PrintWatch columns, Bleeding Cool, 6 August and 11 September 2026
• M.A.S.K. (comic series), Wikipedia, read 31 October 2026

The issue itself is on our M.A.S.K. #1 page.