Batman

The Lego Batman toy line has been going strong for over a decade now, but with this week's release of the Lego Batman Movie, we've seen a truly unprecedented explosion of merchandise based around the Caped Crusader's blockiest incarnation. And with that many figures, going from the Dark Knight himself all the way down to super obscure deep cuts like the Mime and March Harriet, our course here at ComicsAlliance is clear. We need to rank them. So today, we've dug through every single Lego Batman Movie minifig (and eliminated simple variations like "Batman with a slightly different face") to rank them all, worst to best.

We ranked 75 years of Batman movies in one list.

Batman made his first comic book appearance in 1939, but it wasn’t until 1972 that the Mego Corporation got the bright idea to mass-produce a line of toys featuring the superhero and all his gadgets, vehicles, sidekicks, and adversaries. Ever since then, the character has been a staple of the toy aisle, even during the years when his comics weren’t selling so well.

Have you ever seen those movie ads on TV filled with gushing quotes from critics and thought to yourself, “I saw that movie; it was terrible. Where did they find these positive reviews?” If you have, you’re not alone — and you’re going to love ScreenCrush’s newest series, Critics Are Raving!, which balances the cinematic scales with trailers full of slightly more accurate (and slightly more negative) lines from reviews. Real critics. Real quotes. Really bad movies. That’s what’s Critics Are Raving! is all about.

You know how every now and then, you'll see a cover on an old comic, and it'll stick with you even if you don't actually read the issue? That happened to me with Detective Comics #365. Ever since I spotted it on the wall at the comic book store where I used to work, I've held on to that image of that Carmine Infantino image of Batman and Robin attacking a house shaped like the Joker's face, a brick facade shaped into the ramshackle rictus of their arch-nemesis, with guns emerging from his eyes and mouth. It's an amazing image, but it wasn't until I saw it floating around Tumblr the other day that I realized I should actually read the comic --- and it turns out that it's one of the weirdest stories with one of the most fun ideas that I've ever seen in a Silver Age Batman comic.

In the tradition of ScreenCrush series like You Think You Know Movies and You Think You Know TV comes a new YouTube series: Top Five! Every two weeks (or so; we’ve got a lot of other stuff going on), ScreenCrush editor and critic Matt Singer will count down a particular topic from the world of movies (and probably write these introductory posts in the third person).

It’ll be a cold day in hell when Batman joins the ranks of Arrow, Flash, Supergirl or Legends of Tomorrow on The CW, but LEGO has a way of bringing everyone together. See for yourself, as a new promo features the CW stars voicing their LEGO counterparts opposite Will Arnett’s LEGO Batman as part of a weeklong promotion.

Remember that part in The Dark Knight when the Batman knock-offs all pop up in the multi-level parking garage to help the Caped Crusader dispose of some European gangsters, but they just end up getting in the way? They tell the Batman that they were just trying to help, and Wayne chides them for facing men with guns while wearing hockey pants. This may ring some bells for you, but Stephen Lawrence, the subject of the curious new documentary short Being Batman, has evidently forgotten that brief bit. (I’d guess he’s also glossed over the part in The Killing Joke wherein writer Alan Moore suggests that a man would have to be insane to dress up as a bat and fight crime at night.)

For as much as I love the madness that was the comics of the 1990s, I cannot even imagine how incredible it must have been to be a comic-loving kid (or weird comic loving adult) in the 1950/60s period known as The Silver Age. Within this gallery, I've put together only the smallest of fractions of some of the entertaining, out-of-context fun that Batman's 75 years of non-stop published stories have afforded us. Try your best to make sense of them.

If you’ve seen Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, you probably remember the great scene where Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and Ducard (Liam Neeson) fight on a frozen lake. But did you know that all throughout the day Bale and Neeson shot this scene, they could hear cracks in the ice beneath their feet? When the crew returned to the lake the next day, the entire thing had thawed. Yikes. That’s just one of the facts featured in the newest episode of You Think You Know Movies!