The Dark Knight Rises will be coming out on July 20, 2012, and regular readers of CQ know that I’m a super huge Batman nerd. So, I’m pretty excited about it. Sure, I’ve never been a fan of Bane in the comics, and I’m even less of a fan of whatever Christopher Nolan did to his weird mask, but it’s Batman. It’s Christian Bale’s Cookie Monster-voiced Batman. I’ll take whatever excuse I can find to say “Batman”.

Today’s coolest Batman / Dark Knight thing comes from Ata-Boy. Even if you’ve never heard the name, you’ve seen their stuff: neat magnets with goofy catch phrases and visual jokes, pop culture keychains, mugs, and my favorite kind of quick-’n'-easy collectible, buttons.

Ata-Boy showcases a huge range of Batman logos in their 1″ button line, many of which express the Bat-logo throughout its comic history. As someone whose man-purse has been adorned with a hundred different Batman buttons (many at the same time), I really appreciate what Ata-Boy is doing with this particular line of logo pins.

The image above is a small part of assortment of the huge range of these buttons, but you can see a handful of Warholian pop-colored logo pins, a Batman-and-skull logo from an indeterminate storyline, a weird Xeroxed logo, a digital wavelength logo from another obscure story, a graffiti-like logo which uses the letters of ‘Batman’ to form the bat, and (finally) two familiar ones as well: the Batman logo launched with Batman #241 (May 1972) and the squarish-lettered Shadow of the Bat #50 (May 1996) logo font.

As you can see in the above image, there are many more logos from different eras, from the original Golden Age to the Silver Age’s Brave & the Bold, and stuff from the ’70s, ’80s, and beyond. It’s a pretty solid (though not 100% complete) evolution of the logo as it appeared on DC Comics covers. For a long time, I made a point of having a Batman from every decade plastered on my bag, so these are a perfect accent to the whole nerdly ensemble.

Unfortunately, you can’t buy these from Ata-Boy directly, but you can compel your local comic shop to carry these. I don’t think I’ve been to a reputable comic shop which is without Ata-Boy’s awesome stuff, but these Batman pins are what I want to see behind the counter. And all over my body. And I have a lot of body to cover.

[Product graciously provided by Ata-Boy!]

Once again, one of our most excellent readers comes to us with a question—and this one was a challenge.

I have a Hasbro magician figure that is about 12″ high and has a rabbit pop out of his top hat. It says 1999 on the bottom. Can you give me any info on this? I have searched the web but can’t find anything.

Identifying a toy is usually a matter of knowing what other people who didn’t know what to call it… called it. Various searches for ‘magician’, ‘rabbit’, ‘toy’ and ‘figure’ were coming up short. This isn’t an action figure, and it also seems to have mechanisms which would make it a kind of game or interactive toy. It also helps to know that Hasbro functions under a few different brands, and this particular look fits in with their early-2000s Playskool brand.

LEGO-nuts and LEGOnauts are already aware of the Hulk minifigure that comes with LEGO set 6868: Hulk’s Helicarrier Breakout. For a price of around $50, this is the only set in which you can currently score a LEGO Hulk. He looks like this:

Obviously, he’s a few heads taller than your regular figures. He’s a kind of outlier to the whole Avengers thing, and his availability is priced slightly outside of the range of your average LEGO buyer.

But wait! LEGO has just now announced that they’re releasing a second Hulk figure, exclusive to their online shop… and he’s regular sized!

Kind of like their con-exclusive Green Lantern minifigure, this Hulk might never find its way into a standard set. And the Avengers-themed Iron Man LEGOs (with their oversized, sculpted helmets) don’t hold a candle to the Toy Fair exclusive version of Iron Man, which has a painted-on helmet. It’s these subtle variations which make the world of LEGO exciting, as well as the often-stale world of toy collecting.

Sure, you have to buy $50 worth of LEGOs to qualify… but that Master Builder set looks like it’ll fit right in with the upcoming Monster Fighters sets… and oh man, Lord of the Rings LEGOs are available?

Goodbye, paycheck.

Okay, okay. I know that The Avengers has broken box office records and it’s not the number one coolest thing to keep on talking about, but one can’t deny the nerdly catharsis of seeing our heroes on the big screen, or the fact that we nerds need a bit of time to decompress.

I just happen to decompress with LEGOs. Specifically, set 4529 from the Super Heroes line. I’ve written about these big guys before (Captain America, Batman and The Joker), but there’s never been a more appropriate guy to turn into a blocky, armor-y, robot-y form than Iron Man himself. While the others never felt completely correct in their approach, this is the guy that nails it, from the streamlined, angular face to the modular armor pieces.

If you’ve played with LEGO’s Super Heroes line before, you know the drill: they give you all of the parts for a pretty solid hero, instruct you to put it together a little backwards and with extra battle-ready super-accessories, and you eventually figure out that if you switch this piece with the other piece and remove all of the mega-guns and ultra-blades, you have a standard, almost-comic-accurate superhero. While I can’t argue with the neatness of Iron Man’s luminous, blue shoulder cannon, it’s definitely something which would suit a recolored War Machine more accurately. But this is also Iron Man: a guy known for accessorizing the living heck out of himself. A laser cannon on Shellhead is more forgivable than Batman’s body-sized, cerrated death sword.

LEGO Super Heroes Iron Man is doubtlessly the best LEGO Super Hero there is, if only by virtue of the character’s predisposition to robotic shapes. While I shudder to think about what LEGO’s mecha-bodies would do to Wonder Woman or Black Widow (while I simultaneously long to complete my heroic teams), this guy is completely where it’s at. See how he measures up with his Mega Bloks Techbot counterpart!

By now, you’ve either seen The Avengers or you’ve damned yourself to not reading anything on the Internet so that you might avoid spoilers of this season’s most amazing blockbuster. If you’re a purist, you’ve also stopped talking to everyone you know. Those guys are jerks anyhow.

I saw Avengers at a drive in, and it was pretty darned rad. I’m so excited that I’m wearing my Thanos shirt today. If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know why. If you haven’t, go start being cool and come back later.

Even though the premiere has passed, announcements for awesome Avengers stuff are still happening. Today’s announcement, by way of BBTS, is a series of Avengers-themed flash drives. So, if you’ve ever wanted to store data in a Hulk fist…. I guess your dreams have some true. And you should start having better dreams.

What you see here are 8 GB drives in the theme of Iron Man, Thor (or his mighty hammer, Mjolnir), Hulk, and Captain America. There’s also a “Silver Iron Man” in there, but us geeks all know that this is obviously War Machine. InfoThink probably didn’t get the rights to make Iron Man 2 stuff, but this is a close second. While these might not be the easiest things to actually use (try plugging a big, green fist into your Macbook Pro), neato flash drives are an awesome collectible. For $35 each, these are probably way cooler than anything you’ve got going on by way of computer peripherals right now. Unless you’re me, of course.