Although Score has been selling its highly successful Dragon Ball Z CCG to mass merchants for some time, at the recent Retailer Summit in Las Vegas, ICv2 learned that mass merchant penetration will become much more visible in the upcoming holiday season.

Humanoids Publishing, the U.S. arm of French comic publisher Les Humanoides Associes, has announced that it will be producing an American version of Metal Hurlant , the innovative French magazine on which the American Heavy Metal magazine was based.

At the Diamond/Alliance Retailer Summit in Las Vegas last week, Inkworks President Allan Caplan told ICv2 that the company will be producing Scooby Doo trading cards in 2002.

Here are a few of the tidbits from presentations of major comic publishers at the Diamond/Alliance Retailer Summit held in Las Vegas last week.

The first presentation at the Diamond/Alliance Retailer Summit in Las Vegas on Monday evening was Image, which led off with publisher Jim Valentino. He didn't seem too happy with the recent tone of comic industry events, at one point urging the listeners to 'stop the fingerpointing, the blaming, and the namecalling.'

Wizard's Stewart Morales gave his Tony Robbins impression at the Diamond/Alliance Retailer Summit in Las Vegas, roaming the crowd with his headset mike touting upcoming and current Image releases.

In the White Wolf presentation at the Diamond/Alliance Retailer Summit in Las Vegas last week, Director of Sales Fred Yelk announced that, 'White Wolf Publishing is determined to become the #1 independent publisher of d20 products.'

Dark Horse released sales figures for its best-selling manga collections in its presentation at the Diamond/Alliance Retailer Summit in Las Vegas.

When Diamond and Alliance opened the floor for questions from retailers during a luncheon event at the Retailer Summit in Las Vegas this week, it only took a few minutes before the topic of Diamond's proposed change to a Thursday release day for new comic shipments was raised, and once it was raised little else was discussed for the remainder of the Q&A session.

So far the answer to the question, 'Can the market absorb all the high profile DVD releases that are hitting the street this month,' appears to be a resounding yes!

IF Labs, the company founded by Funimation and Irwin Toy to create high end Dragon Ball figures, displayed a few of their increasingly sophisticated designs at the Diamond Retailer Summit in Las Vegas.

The DVD and VHS editions of this sequel to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer have garnered over 3 million preorders, which should provide some notion of how popular this particular franchise will be this holiday season.