At the kickoff of the 2002 holiday season, we talked to distributors that sell to pop culture stores in four major categories -- toys, games, anime, and comics/graphic novels.

Retailers reporting their top dollar products to ICv2 based on October sales listed products with retail prices varying by over a factor of 100, showing that it's not necessarily a high price (or a low one) that produces big dollar volume.

Evergreen properties were atop all five product categories of our Top 10 Cool lists for September. Batman was #1 in both comics and toys,...

Hasbro released its Q3 numbers this week and reported net income of $56 million, up from $51 million in the same period last year.

Vivendi Universal's Vu Games has announced the upcoming launch of Lord of the Rings: Middle Earth Online , a massively multi-player online roleplaying game (MMORPG) based on the Tolkien works.

The robust sales patterns that have characterized the Spider-Man-influenced summer of 2002 continued to make their mark on ICv2's Top Ten List for July. Even more than usual, big ticket items tended to dominate the lists this month.

In comics, Spidey still holds three of the Top 10 Cool Comics in June, with the Kevin Smith-penned Spider-Man/Black Cat #1 in the top slot.

We recently covered the introduction of the online version of Magic: The Gathering . Jerry Ringi feels it's an attack on his livelihood.

Wizards of the Coast has released the logo and the first description of Onslaught , the next expansion for Magic: The Gathering . Onslaught is slated to go on sale in October, and the cards will be available in a number of different formats.

Yu-Gi-Oh is a hot topic with retailers because they can see that this CCG could be a top seller in the hobby if only enough product were available. Gail Burt of Metropolis Comics contrasts M:TG with Pokemon and has some advice for Upper Deck if they want to make Yu-Gi-Oh a perennial seller.