On the eve of the U.S.'s largest comic festival, with some 50,000 fans and industry types set to descend on San Diego for Comic-Con International this coming weekend, the L.A. Times published a lengthy feature article by Glenn Gaslin.

For Part II of our series on successful retailing of apparel in pop culture stores, ICv2 talked with Warp II of Edmonton, Alberta.

There is no doubt that manga's influence on American comics appears to be growing. Witness two stories that appeared on Newsarama this week. Michael Doran broke the story of Marvel's plan for an eight-title Marvel ' Mangaverse ' event planned for January, 2002, while Matt Brady detailed plans at DC Comics to use manga artist Kia Asamiya (Silent Moebius, Dark Angel) for a series of Titans covers.

The British website Empire On Line is reporting that Oscar-winning actor Nicholas Cage will star as Johnny Blaze in a movie version of the Ghost Rider comic. The film will be directed by Steven Norrington, who brought Marvel's Blade to the big screen.

Marvel Comics has signed an 'expansive' three-year licensing agreement with Diamond Select Toys, a sister company of Diamond Comic Distributors.

Overcoming an early spate of bad reviews, The Mummy Returns started the summer movie season off with a bang last weekend by bringing in $70.1 million, the largest non-holiday opening in box office history.

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.

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.

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.

Since 1990, newsstand sales of the hundred top selling magazines in the U.S. have declined by 40%. Certainly the proliferation of new titles is partially responsible for the decline in the sales of individual magazines, but doesn't completely explain the fact that the average sell-through for all magazines has plummeted to just 36%.