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Lego has announced a new franchise-crossing video game that, like Skylanders, Nintendo's amiibo figures and Disney Infinity, uses real toys placed on a special pad to import the characters into the game. Lego Dimensions, from Warner Bros and TT Games, will launch with a $99.99 starter pack that includes Wyldstyle from The Lego Movie, Lord of the Rings' Gandalf, and Batman and a Batmobile --- and because it's a Lego game, players will get to construct the game's portal gateway out of Lego bricks.

Costume design is one of the great strengths of the superhero genre, a way to establish distinctive visual shorthand for a character and reveal key details about concept, purpose, and personality. But which is the best superhero costume of all time? This month, we’re asking you to decide, by voting up your favorites and voting down the rest. When we have your votes, we’ll compile a list of the greatest super-costumes of all time. In today's poll we look at some of costumes worn by the members of notorious loner Batman's extended bat-family, including the recently revamped Burnside take on Batgirl, the original Robin design first worn by Dick Grayson, and the same character's much later Nightwing costume.We haven't included the Nightwing costume with the fringe, as we're pretty sure that costume isn't going to win any polls.

A group of comic artists including The Kitchen's Ming Doyle (artist site), Unbeatable Squirrel Girl's Erica Henderson (artist site), Howard the Duck's Joe Quinones, (artist site) and Where Is Jake Ellis's Jordan Gibson (artist site) recently came together to brainstorm and illustrate some of their favorite celebrities for #DCBend, a Tumblr-based fancast of the heroes and villains of the DCU with women in male roles and men in female roles. While the concept of gender-swapped casting and fan art for comic movies is not a new one, DCBend has lead to some really inspired choices by some of the rising stars of comics. Check out the entire gallery, including some that are debuting for the first time on ComicsAlliance.

Nightwing is comics' hottest male superhero. His superior hotness is a fact so indisputable that, when we compiled our list of the 50 Sexiest Guys In Comics a while back, there was never any serious doubt that he would come out on top. His appeal is not only recognized by fans, but also by creators and even by publisher DC, which has been known to pander to his fans on several occasions. In an industry that doesn't generally make time for the female gaze, Dick Grayson has emerged as one of the medium's few male sex symbols. But what is it about Dick Grayson that sets him apart among the macho mannequins of superhero comics? Is it his personality? His history? His character design? His butt? ComicsAlliance spoke to Dick Grayson experts Tim Seeley and Devin Grayson, and several of the character's fans, and undertook an intense study of the source material, to get to the lovely bottom of this great question.

Q: Why aren’t there more heroic duos or “tag teams?” -- @awa64 A: Friend, I don't usually like to start off these columns by specifically denying the premise of the question, but there are a lot of heroic duos in the world of superhero comics. I mean, even if we're just limiting ourselves to the most famous superheroes out there, the top of that list is going to include both the World's Finest and the Dynamic Duo, and you don't have to look much harder to find other pairings further down the list. Unless, of course, you're specifically asking why there aren't more actual pro wrestling tag teams that have taken up crime-fighting when they're not busy in the ring, in which case I have no idea, but rest assured that is something I want to see.

Although cosplay has been present for decades within the comics, anime, and sci-fi/fantasy fandoms, social media has played an integral role in the thriving communities of costuming that exist, such as Cosplay.com and the Superhero Costuming Forum. Over the years, the cosplay community has evolved into a creative outlet for many fans to establish and showcase some impressive feats of homemade disguise, craftsmanship, and sartorial superheroics at conventions. In honor of the caped crusaders of the convention scene, ComicsAlliance has created Best Cosplay Ever (This Week), an ongoing collection of some of the most impeccable, creative, and clever costumes that we’ve discovered and assembled into a super-showcase of pure fan-devoted talent.

The 1966 Batman television show was one of the most successful and influential adaptations of comic books to mass media of all time. Over the course of three seasons and 120 episodes, the series became a cultural force with its unique combination of tongue-in-cheek humor, thrilling superhero adventure and celebrity guest stars, and shaped the way the public would view the Caped Crusader for the next five decades. Now, in the midst of a well-deserved renaissance of the show, ComicsAlliance is proud to present The Batman '66 Episode Guide, an in-depth examination of every single adventure, arch-criminal and deathtrap cliffhanger of the series. This week, the Riddler and Molly enact their fiendish plot, and someone... dies?!

Listen, it's hard for me to get excited when comic book characters I love show up in mass media. I mean, I saw a movie this summer that just threw a hundred foot-tall, Jack Kirby-designed Exitar the Exterminator into a cameo for giggles, so just hearing a name that I recognize isn't enough anymore. In other words, I'm jaded as heck. Or at least I thought I was, until I found out that Carrie Kelly is going to show up in next week's episode of Teen Titans Go! and promptly lost my sugar. If you've been following the show, and you should be, you may have notice that the Titans are actually pretty lazy and very rarely do any actual crimefighting, which is probably why Robin has another team made entirely of Robins.

Readers demand a lot from superhero comics: consistency, continuity, adherence to the rules of the universe, compelling heroes, magnetic villains, satisfying endings, and the list goes on. But those of us who have been reading for years (if not decades) are chiefly looking for one big thing above all else: novelty. We want to see something we’ve never seen before; characters we recognize as the heroes and villains we love being put into scenarios and settings wholly unlike what’s come in nearly 80 years of superhero comics. That’s notoriously hard to do. Many times, stories end up being very similar to what’s come before, and when creators do try something new, they elicit complaints from readers who don’t like particular changes or decisions. But what if you could strip away those pressures and build a superhero comic that’s so strange and unique that it’s a must-read? That’s what Jiro Kuwata’s 1960s Batman comics, currently being republished as the DC Digital Series Batman: The Jiro Kuwata Batmanga, are. A strange combination of classic Batman comics, the 1960s Batman TV-show, Marvel-Age science-based storytelling, mysticism, cartoon physics, Tokusatsu, and of all things, Scooby-Doo, it isn’t like any comic I’ve ever read. It’s endlessly surprising, and I love it.

Each weekday, ComicsAlliance brings you a carefully selected variety of links from around the web about comics and comics-related media, including movies, video games, toys, and whatever else might be worth noting. Quite frankly, these are items you may just need to know about to have a productive day. Take a look at today's hand-picked links after the jump.