In honor of Comic-Con International, the huge and nerd-tastic comic book convention, opening tonight, here’s the new teaser trailer for the third of Hollywood director Chris Nolan’s elegant Batman movie series, “The Dark Knight Rises.”

The movie debuts next year and will be the final installment for this franchise. The previous film starred the late Heath Ledger as the Joker.

And, this latest effort already looks creepier and darker than ever, featuring a leather-clad Catwoman (played by Anne Hathaway) and a whole lot of special effects:

Here’s a curious trend I’ve noticed developing quickly on YouTube, probably because of the acclaim that the late actor Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker in “The Dark Knight” has garnered.

His memorably malevolent turn in the latest Batman movie is likely to result a posthumous Oscar for Ledger. But perhaps more interesting is the number of fans who are doing video impressions of his performance, acting out various scenes from the movie, and posting them online in tribute.

Here are just such few videos, including ones that are dead serious and others not so much, as well as a compilation of Ledger’s various scenes at the end:

Joker/Batman Spoof

Joker Interrogation Scene

Joker Mob Meeting Scene

Joker Party Crashing Scene

Joker “Why So Serious?” Scene (as channeled by Hayden Black of “abigail’s ‘x-rated’ teen diary”)

Heath Ledger as Joker Compilation

One of my favorite things about the Web is how quickly and effectively you can take media and mash it up into all sorts of new forms.

Case in point, this comparison of scenes from a trailer from the latest Batman movie, “The Dark Knight” and that of 1989′s original “Batman.”

Incredibly, many of the scenes are almost exactly alike.

(I had posted some trailers from “The Dark Knight” here, at the time of actor Heath Ledger’s death in January. Ledger stars in the upcoming movie as a very malevolent Joker.)

See the trailer mashup here, which is on CollegeHumor:

One of the most interesting wrinkles on the Web over the last several years has been the near instant ability to create tribute videos for all sorts of reasons, most of which are an amalgam of pictures or snippets of videos that are set to music.

That’s been especially true in the cases of those who have died and especially with celebrities.

The death of Heath Ledger, of course, has been no exception. There are currently about 4,500 videos related to the actor that have been posted on YouTube, for example, over the last week alone. Some of the tributes have already garnered hundreds of thousands of views.

Here are two of the top videos, along with a music video Ledger directed himself for a Ben Harper song called “Morning Yearning,” at the bottom:

It is hard to look away from the swirl of media that the untimely and tragic death of Heath Ledger has engendered, and the Internet has jacked the frenzy into overdrive.

Along with an explosion of Web stories and video about the late actor–unfortunately too, please-don’t videos from outside the home of his family seem particularly appalling–there has also been controversy around a very prominent online marketing campaign that has been going on related to the next in the blockbuster Batman series, “The Dark Knight.”

Why? Because it has been focused almost exclusively on Ledger, who plays what appears to be a very warped and malevolent version of the villainous Joker (pictured here).

A terrific story in The Wall Street Journal yesterday looked at this Internet-aimed marketing effort around the Warner Bros. movie, set to come out this summer.

It’s been a slowly unfolding viral campaign online, stretching three-quarters of a year now, almost all focused on Ledger’s Joker character. It began in May with a site showing a fictional district attorney candidate, IBelieveinHarveyDent.com (still up) and then another with a defaced picture and clues, IBelieveinHarveyDentToo.com (now you only get a “page not found” message).

There have been lots of efforts like this with sites like the Gotham Times and a scarier version called the HaHaHa Times.

And, of course, the many trailers, seen below, which are all over the Web now.

But now that the already creepy online effort has taken on an even more macabre tone, one wonders what Warner Bros. will do.

Or, because this is the Web, where things tend to spin out of the control of media companies, whether the movie company can do anything at all.

Here’s some trailers, all of which are pretty amazing: