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.

At today's Marvel news conference, Marvel President Bill Jemas announced the renewal of Marvel's agreement with Diamond Comic Distributors to continue Diamond's exclusive distribution of Marvel titles in the direct market. In addition, the two companies agreed that Diamond would also represent Marvel's trade paperbacks in the traditional bookstore marketplace.

On Wednesday April 18, 2001, the Washington Post printed a lengthy article by Hank Stuever that focused on DC artist Phil Jimenez and his obsession with Wonder Woman . Stuever's essay covers the entire history of the character, who first appeared some sixty years ago just one month before Pearl Harbor.

Marvel has announced that X-Force #116 , the first issue written by Peter Milligan and illustrated by Mike Allred, will not carry the Comics Code Authority's seal of approval. This is the first time that this has happened since way back in the 1970s when a Stan Lee-penned issue of Spider-Man took on the issue of drugs.