In an open letter addressed to 'Friends of Magic' and posted on the Wizards of the Coast website, Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering , announced that he is stepping down to concentrate on personal interests.

It's only the first weekend in May, but Universal Studios is readying The Mummy Returns for a mammoth release...

This article contains a chart showing the top 300 comic titles ordered from Diamond North America based on Diamond's reported title indexes and external title data, and interpolation of the remaining numbers.

In his introductory speech at the Harvey Awards presented at the Pittsburgh Comicon, Frank Miller characterized Wizard Magazine as a 'tapeworm' and, somewhat more grandiloquently, as a 'bible written by Satan.'

Paramount, which is mounting a major advertising and promotional push for the Tomb Raider movie has pulled out all the stops in creating a new website for the summer blockbuster which opens this June 15th. The new site includes IPIX technology which allows visitors to explore 360-degree panoramas of fifty of the film's sets and locations.

The 'Harvey' awards, named in honor of famed creator Harvey Kurtzman, have found a new home at the Pittsburgh Comicon. This year's awards were fairly evenly distributed with artist Chris Ware gaining the most recognition with three awards including 'Best Continuing Series' for Acme Library.

As more products became available in March stores reported positive sales trends to ICv2. In anime, DVDs took five of the ten spots including the first two, which were occupied by high ticket boxed and collector's set editions. Note that the videos in the top ten were all new releases from very popular series, Gundam Wing, Dragonball Z , and Martian Successor Nadesico.

Several alert readers have emailed ICv2 about our story, 'X-Force #116 To Be Non-Code.' In the story we quoted Marvel's assertion that this was the first mainstream Marvel Superhero comic to go without the Code's seal of approval since the 1970s. Our readers immediately asked us, 'what about those Garth Ennis-penned Punisher books? They weren't code approved, were they?'

AIA, a new game company, is preparing an Akira videogame for the Sony Playstation 2. The Akira game will be out in August, just a few weeks after the release of the remastered Akira video and DVD. Other Akira merchandise includes the McFarlane Toys second series of Anime toys, shipping in September, and the Dark Horse manga series.

Just as Marvel has moved its bookstore distribution from LPC to Diamond, ICv2 has learned that Dark Horse is moving from Penguin to LPC for its exclusive bookstore distribution. Though no press release has been issued as of yet, we've been told that the switch will take effect on July 27, 2001. With its extensive backlist of comic trade paperback titles (only DC's is bigger) Dark Horse is a comic industry leader in bookstore sales.