Updated 8:15pm EST 3/12/18

You never know where the next piece of IDW Sonic news is going to come from, and today it came from former Archie Sonic artist, Matt Herms! This morning Herms tweeted out a previously unseen cover for issue #1 captioned, “@tyson_hesse This Diamond Retailer Summit variant is beautiful, dude!”

They cover displays Sonic and Tails in a colored foreground with a classic Green Hills style zone and badniks in the black & white background. There has been no official statement from IDW regarding this cover, but it seems that it is a special 6th variant cover that will be exclusively available at the upcoming Diamond Retailer Summit April 4-6.

It is yet unclear if industry insider and former coworker on Archie Sonic, Matt Herms was given permission to release the image or if he accidentally leaked it in excitement to praise Hesse’s work. Either way, if the tweet is accurate, this variant cover will only be available at the Diamond Retailer Summit, a yearly convention exclusively for comic book retailers.

I am speculating that this may be the same artwork that will be featured on the connecting A cover with different coloring. Although I cannot yet confirm that at this point, the cover’s lay out definitely seems to allow that option. The sprawling zone in the background seems like it could naturally flow into other covers to make a larger scene! Nevertheless, this remains to be seen, but the exclusive nature of this cover will doubtlessly make it perhaps the rarest and most sought after #1 of the now 6 known covers!

UPDATE: Tyson Hesse confirmed that the variant is indeed a black & white version of the A cover!