Playdates 2001 'Top 10 Best Selling Toys' has anointed Lego's Bionicles as the best-selling toy line for the 2001 holiday season.

A mixture of new and old products make up our Top 10 Cool lists for September, 2001, both in the sense of new and retro properties and creative material, and in the sense of products new to the list and those that have previously appeared.

Over the past year, there's been a lot of controversy surrounding Marvel's no-overprint/no reprint policy. Origin has been the Marvel title around which this discussion has swirled most recently.

Over the past few weeks, we've done two major articles on Diamond's poll regarding the release day for new comics that produced some retailer response.

Heroes -- Marvel's tribute/benefit book for September 11th charities -- sold out its first printing at the distributor level on Wednesday, October 17th, the day it was released.

According to press reports, U.S.-Canada border crossings near Champlain, New York were closed for several hours last week due to a bomb threat and a suspicious van involving A.N. Derringer, a major freight forwarder in the area.

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.

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.

On October 15, David Bogart will join the staff at Marvel Comics as a Managing Editor. Maureen McTigue will assume Bogart's position as Editor-in-Chief of Harris Comics.