In what Marvel COO Bill Jemas referred to as 'by far the largest and best electronic game deal in the history of Marvel,' the 'House of Ideas' has licensed Vu Games, a subsidiary of Vivendi Universal to create a worldwide, multi-lingual, massively multi-player on-line game based on Marvel's universe of more than 4,700 characters.

We recently reported that comic retailers are being asked to vote on which Marvel movie weekend they would like Free Comic Day 2003-- X-Men 2 or Hulk . FCBD founder Joe Field prefers X-Men 2 while Marvel EIC Joe Quesada prefers the Hulk . Here are their essays on why.

Plans for Free Comic Book Day 2003 are underway, and the first order of business is selecting a date. To do so, the committee charged with organizing the event is taking a comic retailer poll via the Diamond Website between two major comic-based movie releases.

In spite of the obvious success that comic book-based films have had in Hollywood over the past year, and despite the fact that fellow AOL/Time Warner company DC Comics has an enormous roster of characters, Warner Brothers has been unable to pull the trigger and squeeze off another round in the battle of cinematic superheroes.

The Spider-Man film spurred increased sales of Spider-Man merchandise, a track record that will easily justify additional outreach efforts synchronized with the wallcrawler's video release on Nov.2.

Marvel's Ultimate line was the strongest presence in the top ten comics ordered by U.S. pop culture stores for September, with four of the top ten.

Estimated quantities for initial orders on comics shipping in September 2002 from pop culture stores ordering from Diamond US.

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.

Although three actors from Mutant X were signing at the Inkworks booth in San Diego, and we thought we were being told with a nod and a wink that Inkworks had the license (and reported it as fact for about 16 hours on Thursday), it turns out it was just a nod and a wink--don't look for Mutant X trading cards any time soon.

The largest comic/pop culture convention in the U.S. just keeps getting bigger. This year, exhibition space for the San Diego Comic-Con International grew by 25% to 350,000 square feet.