Not every retailer has the same opportunity to succeed with 'kids comics' as the three profiled in this story, but many can utilize at least some of the stratagems employed so effectively by these storeowners. One theme that is consistent with all three retailers is that they provide one area of their store as an enclave for younger readers.

Master comic scribe Dennis O'Neil, whose work as a writer and editor is legendary, has written a 'how-to' book for aspiring comic book writers. Using examples from his own career as well as samples from the works of other top comic writers, O'Neil examines some of the many different approaches to writing four-color adventures.

The Top 10 Cool lists for February, 2001 have just gone up on ICv2, and our comments are below. These lists are compiled from actual sales submitted by retailers.

Sometimes the pop culture products industry gets pretty wild and woolly, and last week was such a time, with three stories in different venues providing some diversion from our regularly scheduled programming.

Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , which over the past weekend became the first foreign language film to gross over $100 million, will be released on video this June.

Art Asylum will produce four or five action figures based on characters from the film and create a comic adaptation of the story in conjunction with Image, which will publish the graphic novel version.

Fantagraphics Books has announced that the Ghost World film, based on the Daniel Clowes graphic novel, will be released in June, somewhat later than previously announced.

This article contains a chart showing the top 200 comic titles by quantity ordered, based on Diamond's reported index numbers, actual orders obtained from non-Diamond sources, and interpolation of the remaining numbers.

Alliance Game Distributors and Diamond Comic Distributors have announced that they will jointly have the exclusive right to distribute Game Workshop's new table-top war game based on the film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Ri ngs trilogy.

Sunbeam's connection to the pop culture retailer comes from its principal shareholder, financier Ronald Perelman, whose tumultuous tenure at Marvel has touched nearly every player in our market.