Maybe it's because the specialty market is counter-cyclical, or maybe it's because it is product driven and there are lots of good products in the offing, but according to retailers ICv2 heard from, the pulse of the industry is strong right now, at least judging from the talk at the DC RRP.

Fox's X-Men grabbed the most nominations for the 27th annual Saturn Awards presented by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films. The first motion picture featuring Marvel's mutant supergroup earned over $150 million at the box office and a whopping ten Saturn nominations.

April 4, 2001. In a conference call with the press today, Marvel President Bill Jemas didn't mince words when defending his 'no overprint policy' In response to a question on the topic from ICv2, he responded, 'It's sort of an IQ test for comic retailers. You can count the digits in their IQ based on their enthusiastic reaction to the 'no overprints policy.''

The Top 10 Cool lists for February, 2001 have just gone up on ICv2, and our comments are below. These lists are compiled from actual sales submitted by retailers.

Paul Jenkins, writer of Spider-Man, Hulk, Inhumans, Sentry , and Witchblade has taken a position at Top Cow as lead story editor. His primary responsibility will be working with all the Top Cow writers in an editorial capacity to ensure a uniform strategic direction in storylines.

Sometimes the pop culture products industry gets pretty wild and woolly, and last week was such a time, with three stories in different venues providing some diversion from our regularly scheduled programming.

Since the implementation of Marvel's 'no overprint' policy, some retailers that were shorted on initial shipments were not able to get replacement copies.

Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , which over the past weekend became the first foreign language film to gross over $100 million, will be released on video this June.

Although its ability to execute its strategy is yet to be proven, Marvel is in fact pursuing a two-pronged strategy that includes substantially increasing its output of trade paperbacks and graphic novels as well as trying to imrove sales of its periodical comics.

Art Asylum will produce four or five action figures based on characters from the film and create a comic adaptation of the story in conjunction with Image, which will publish the graphic novel version.