Our Top 10 Cool lists, which rank the best-selling products in pop culture stores, are dominated by franchise properties (with a few surprises) in our rankings for March 2002.

Expectations are high for Free Comic Book Day, the comic industry promotional event happening on May 4, the day after the Spider-Man movie opens.

We heard from a buyer for another specialty retail chain, who told us that while Gamestop was 'notorious' for breaking street dates, in this case his chain had also been shipped earlier than necessary to make the street date.

Non-sports trading cards can be a successful product category, so we sought out a couple of retailers that we were told do an especially good job of merchandising and promoting entertainment cards to find out their secrets.

Sabertooth Games, publisher of the Warhammer 40,000 CCG, has announced that Keith Strohm has joined the company as Director of Communications.

Two #1 products repeated in February, a testament to the strength of some recent releases and the weaker competition scheduled for this normally weak month.

All three of the largest US manga publishers told ICv2 that sales are booming for manga trade paperbacks.

January is a transition month in the pop culture products business, with the first week or two typically showing strong post-Christmas sales, followed by slowing traffic as the winter doldrums set in. But there was a lot of activity in pop culture stores this January, with especially strong releases in the comic category.

U.S. sales for mid-sized comic publishers were a mixed bag in 2002, with big increases and decreases the norm according to our analysis of circulation and dollar data from the last two years.

Nelvana, the Canadian-based distributor of children's programming and products, has acquired the rights to the latest Japanese toy craze, Beyblades , as well as to the anime series the toy tops have inspired.