Marvel and DC are pulling out all the stops for December in a contest to see which publisher will gain the most customers from an expected wave of new consumers surging into comic stores that month.

A mixture of new and old products make up our Top 10 Cool lists for September, 2001, both in the sense of new and retro properties and creative material, and in the sense of products new to the list and those that have previously appeared.

Here are a few of the tidbits from presentations of major comic publishers at the Diamond/Alliance Retailer Summit held in Las Vegas last week.

Dark Horse released sales figures for its best-selling manga collections in its presentation at the Diamond/Alliance Retailer Summit in Las Vegas.

A new line of toys from Oscar-winning special effects master Stan Winston ( Terminator, Aliens, Jurassic Park, Batman Returns ) is planned for October.

The first 80-page installment of Frank Miller's Dark Knight Strikes Again, one of the most highly anticipated comic releases in years, will be accompanied to market by a second monster product capable of generating huge sales, the Dark Knight Strikes Again Statue .

Veteran comic scribe Chuck Dixon, who began writing for four-color heroes back in 1985, is heading to Tampa to join forces with the Crossgen team on March 1, 2002.

According to Variety , Frank Miller and Geoff Darrow are in talks with Warner Bros. for the movie rights to their Hard Boiled property, which was published as a comic by Dark Horse in the early 90s.

The big players seemed to dominate this month, with multiple products associated with the strongest properties taking many of the top slots.

D-Boy, Inc., in association with Studio Tron and Fanboy, Inc. plans to release a series of collectible pewter statues based on the gorgeous female leads in Kia Asamiya's Silent Mobius manga.