We knew it was coming when we spotted a vintage Strawberry Shortcake t-shirt on the Gen-X coed at our neighborhood coffee store a few weeks back.

Initial March comic orders from US pop culture retailers were up 7% over March 2001, powered by strong performances from Marvel and Dark Horse.

The best-selling comic title for March 2002, New X-Men , has initial raw orders to Diamond US of only around 104,000 copies, the lowest quantity for a #1 comic title since April of last year.

Marvel Comics announced today that it will be reducing its retail prices on new trade paperbacks by $2 to $3, depending on page count, beginning in July 2002.

Steve Jackson Games has announced that its upcoming Hellboy RPG will include a new comic with script by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, Jai Nitz, and Steve Jackson Games' Philip Reed, pencils by Zach Howard, and inks by Peter Bergting.

Tezuka began to publish his Phoenix manga stories to demonstrate that the medium he helped define had the potential to be as thought-provoking as any other branch of art or literature.

Fred Schodt is the translator of the Astro Boy series from Dark Horse (and the co-translator of Phoenix , from Viz), but he is much more than a translator, he is an important conduit of Japanese culture to the English-speaking world.

Spike Milligan, the last surviving creator of the groundbreaking radio comedy series, The Goon Show, died Wednesday at the age of 83.

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.

DC Direct will be expanding its simulta- neous release program to include more releases than the Smallville figures previously announced.