Wizards of the Coast, the world's leading manufacturer of collectible card games, has announced plans for the release of its Harry Potter trading card game, which will debut in August.

The retailer sales numbers that ICv2 has collected for June continue to display the trends that we have seen over the past six months.

Initially the game will have about 230-250 cards with four different theme decks (55 cards each) for each of the competing forces: Orks, Marines, Chaos, and Eldar. Decks will be packed 12 per display.

The Game Industry Forum and the Comic Book Industry Alliance, two popular Internet discussion forums for the members of their respective trades are sponsoring an effort to create an organization that would include both comic and game retailers.

The 'Comics' and 'Toy' categories got very competitive in May with the successful debut of Marvel's revamped X-Men titles and the release of new Simpsons and Tomb Raider toys.

4Kids Entertainment, the company that packaged Pokemon for the U.S. market, is back with another major anime property, Yu-Gi-Oh , the anime/card game that trumped Pokemon in Japan.

Nelvana, the Canadian-based packager and producer of animated cartoons, announced that it has granted a worldwide license (minus Asia and Italy) to Hasbro for the production of toys based on the Medabot cartoon series which debuts on the Fox network next fall.

The success of Gundam on the Cartoon Network, the video revival of the Transformers , and the surprising interest in Comedy Central's Battlebot s have created something of a 'robot trend,' which has inspired a slew of robot-themed TV series and toys coming this fall.

Trends that we have seen during the first quarter, such as the increasing dominance of the DVD format, the overall sales importance of high ticket items, and the continuing reign of CCGs are even more apparent in the April numbers.

Pearl Harbor opened this weekend, and Hasbro's new line of Pearl Harbor G.I. Joe figures just happened to hit the marketplace the same week