Right now, any discussion of Batman movies is obviously centered on The Dark Knight Rises, the final chapter of Christopher Nolan's much heralded cinmatic Bat-trilogy.  This year, though, Warner Premiere is hard at work adapting one of the most influential comics ever created.  As has long been rumored, Frank Miller's epochal 1986 masterpiece The Dark Knight Returns is getting a DC Universe animated adaptation, and today we have new details.

That sound you hear is Warner Bros. opening the promotional floodgates for The Dark Knight Rises, which is the summer's biggest impending superhero movie, now that The Avengers has broken so many records and cleared the way for Christopher Nolan's climactic Batman movie.  Today, there are no fewer than six character posters for the sequel, two each for the Caped Crusader, the villainous Bane, and the adaptable Catwoman.

What's kind of like the NBA Playoffs?  The war to control the fictitious Gotham City in The Dark Knight Rises, the climactic installment of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy.  Both the movie and the playoffs feature a man dressed up as a giant Bat using a high tech arsenal to fight crime, a burglarizing woman dressed like a slinky cat, and a monomaniacal villain who you can bet won't win out in the end.  Okay, so the playoffs don't have those first two, but the inhabitants of Cleveland could persuasively argue that LeBron James fits the bill for the last one.

This is a big year for archery in popular culture.  At the movies, we've already seen Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games and next month Pixar's Princess Merida will sling some arrows, while Marvel's resident marksman Hawkeye is currently killing aliens/wearing no sleeves in The Avengers.  The best man with a bow in the DC universe is getting his own live-action iteration this year too, as the Green Arrow leads the new television series Arrow.

With a certain Marvel Studios superhero team-up making money hand over fist in record-breaking amounts of time, there's been a lot of discussion about the box office fate of the third and final installment in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy.  All this talk of comparative opening weekends is not only premature, it misses the basic and undeniably happy point that this a summer in which we're treated to both The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises.

Things have been pretty quiet on the Dark Knight Rises front as of late.  With Marvel and Disney's orgiastic superhero crossover The Avengers monopolizing our superhero hype attentions, Warner Bros has wisely opted to let Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, and Thor have their time.  The second full theatrical trailer for The Dark Knight Rises is set to debut with The Avengers this Friday, though, so Batman's about to start getting his hype on all over again.

While we've been happily inundated with hype-building material from a certain Marvel and Disney joint, the promotional juggernaut for a big, bat-loving DC Comics hero has been quietly getting ready to bombard audiences.  The Dark Knight Rises is arguably the most anticipated movie of the summer, and it's appropriate that a new trailer will precede the other most anticipated movie, The Avengers.  When the final Christopher Nolan-directed Batman adventure arrives, it will boast more than a full hour of footage shot on IMAX cameras.

The DC Comics character of Lobo has, somewhat improbably, been the subject of numerous attempts at cinematic adaptation, including the long, long-ago rumored Superman movie that would pit the Kryptonian against the big blue alien biker.  Unlike many of the squeaky clean inhabitants of the DC Universe, Lobo is a different beast, a grizzled alien with no morals and a love of the old ultra-violence.  So it's somewhat surprising that Warner Bros has hired the director of Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore to develop Lobo.

The Avengers premiered last night and Twitter promptly lit up with enthusiastic responses to Marvel and Disney's big team-up.  As if in a calculated move, a crop of new The Dark Knight Rises images are floating about online to make audiences conflicted about which summer superhero movie they're has them in the biggest mouth-foaming fervor.  The newly rated PG-13 capper to Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy has been in post-production for months, and we've not seen much from the film, so lap up these seven new stills.

There's well over a year until Man of Steel arrives at a theater near you, but it's not to early to reveal the Superman reboot's official logo via a banner baring a familiar symbol.  That would be a new variation on the iconic "S" that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's creation has worn on his chest ever since his first appearance almost 75 years ago.