Going out to fight crime and/or breakups the world over and just don’t know which shoes will match your tights and cape?

Well LimitedSoles feels your pain. And so, for the superhero in all of us, they’ve introduced DC Comics-licensed, limited edition sneaks. (Well, not for the superhero in ALL of us. Ladies, if you’re looking for the female heroes of your childhood — how hard would it be to put out a nice pair of Wonder Woman kicks? — well, so far, they’re about as invisible as her trusty jet.)

LimitedSoles will offer only three varieties of the shoes: Batman, Joker, and Superman, and in limited quantities, too –  1,939 pairs of the Batman shoes (after Batman’s first appearance in 1939), 1,940 pairs of the Joker model, and 1,938 pairs of Superman — so you may have to leap tall buildings to score a pair in the first place.

I take it that by now most people with a pulse have seen The Dark Knight at least 1/5 as many times as my 18-year-old brother, not counting IMAX. Still, no spoilers here, except maybe of your jaunty “ain’t love grand?” mood. The Onion’s AV Club recently took up a topic from one of The Dark Knight’s IMDB boards — one that took what we over here take to be a bit of a disturbing turn. The question at hand: “Is The Joker ‘sexy’ — too sexy, in fact, to be an effective villain?”

Um, quick bio: The Joker is a deeply disturbed killer who shows no remorse for his actions. He takes perverse pleasure in chaos; he will go to any length to bring it about. My father, quaintly, compared The Joker to the Phantom of the Opera. Sure, some of us — uncomfortably — do find The Phantom a bit arousing, but he, let’s recall, is motivated by love. We know his sorrowful backstory; we develop sympathy for him, trapped as he is in an unbearable soundtrack. The Joker, by contrast, appears out of nowhere, backstory-, alias-, and fingerprint-free, motivated by nothing other than pure eeeeeeevil, to wreak havoc upon Gotham. No tragic story, just an appetite for destruction and a terrible hair day. So…”sexy!?” Yikes.

(more…)