In a conference call with the comic press today, Marvel President Bill Jemas announced that Marvel would be pulling out of the CMAA, and would no longer be submitting its books for Comics Code approval.

Moore Action Collectibles announced that it has acquired a license from Twentieth Century Fox licensing to create a line of X-Files action figures.

W.W. Norton, the oldest and largest independent publishing and distribution house in the country, will distribute Fantagraphics Books to the book trade starting this September.

The current issue of Time Magazine online contains a review by Andrew D. Arnold of the latest issue of American Splendor published by Dark Horse.

In an interview with ICv2, a spokesperson for the CMAA was very surprised to hear about Marvel's talk of pulling out of the association, especially since all the publishers had agreed to a meeting on Thursday, May 11th

ICv2 has obtained a photograph of the Deluxe Collector's Edition of the Akira DVD. The simple, but elegant design features the Japanese characters for the title scrawled over the English title. The vibrant red color and the dynamism of the rendering of the Japanese characters demonstrates how the art of calligraphy allows the artist to express emotion.

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.

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.