This is too awesome.

At first glance, The Joker has taken down his I Believe in Harvey Dent, Too website.

Or has he?

Open the page.

All you’ll see is a black background with red letters that say, “Page not found.”

But do a CTRL+A to “Select All” on the page and you’ll see something else entirely.

Lots of laughing.

And some random letters …

… that …

… when strung together …

… say …

… “See you in December.”

The movie opens July 18, 2008. Does that mean we’ll be getting the first trailer for The Dark Knight in December?

Or does it mean something else entirely, something terribly sinister?

I hope Batman’s around when we find out!

This is some of the most fun and exciting movie marketing ever.

L.A. Daily News reports that Anthony Michael Hall — made famous by his appearances in ’80s classics Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Weird Science and currently appearing in the TV series adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone — has joined the cast of The Dark Knight.

Though he says he’s got scenes with Morgan Freeman and Christian Bale, he won’t talk about who the character is. Fair enough. If I got to be in Batman, I wouldn’t talk about it, either, for fear they’d tell me I couldn’t be in it anymore.

So far, we’ve got:

Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman

Heath Ledger as The Joker — first OFFICIAL photo here!

Michael Caine as Alfred Pennyworth

Gary Oldman as Lt. James Gordon

Morgan Freeman as Wayne Enterprises CEO Lucius Fox

(Didn’t you get the memo?)

Aaron Eckhart as Gotham City District Attorney Harvey Dent

Maggie Gyllenhaal as Assistant District Attorney Rachel Dawes

Eric Roberts as crime boss Sal Maroni

Nestor Carbonell as Gotham City’s mayor

William Fichtner as Potentially Very Unlucky Bank Manager

Tim Booth as “Mr. Zsasz, here” (at least according to Mr. Booth in a radio interview)

Rapper David Banner might play one of The Joker’s goons, and Cillian Murphy keeps saying things like “I can’t comment on that” or “It’s not my place to say” when asked if The Scarecrow will return. So I’m betting on a cameo.

Whew! That’s a talented group of people right there.

I’m mortified, terrified and excited beyond reason after seeing this photo and happier than ever about how awesome next summer’s Batman Begins continuation, The Dark Knight, is going to be.

So without further ado, here’s the first official image of Heath Ledger as The Joker:

This one requires some explanation and background:

On Thursday, I posted the link to the I Believe in Harvey Dent website that Warner Bros. put up to promote a mock Gotham City District Attorney campaign for the character of Harvey Dent, played in the film by Aaron Eckhart.

Not to be outdone, The Joker started his own website, called I Believe in Harvey Dent, Too.

When you look at The Joker’s graffiti-covered Dent poster long enough, it slowly dissolves into a very pixeled-up photo of the Joker’s face, BUT, it’s not very clear.

If you enter your email and the secret code (which is there on the page), it will send you a link and some coordinates, which you can enter in to reveal more of the image.

But Jett over at Batman on Film revealed the full image, and it’s a shocker. It’s a weird angle, and it’s blurry and it’s grainy, but it’s very creepy and disturbing beyond description. He’s got a gash of a smile slashed across the length of his face, and clown makeup applied haphazardly around the blistery scars. His skin is ashen and pale, like it’s been chemically bleached.

Hopefully we’ll see a better image soon that reveals his face in a better context. But so far, I can’t believe what I’m seeing. I can’t believe they’re actually going as far as they’re going with his look, and that makes me feel very good about this movie. Batman Begins didn’t pull any punches, and this first image of Ledger as The Joker leaves me confident that Christopher Nolan and the gang are going to take this one up a notch. Begins was a very mature film in the sense that it treated Batman more like a figure out of classic literature — like The Count of Monte Cristo, for example — than like a comic book. (And why not? Batman’s been around in the comics since 1939. That’s classic to me.) Casting an actor of Heath Ledger’s caliber to go up against Christian Bale’s indomitable Batman was pure genius on Nolan’s part, and I can’t wait to see how this one shakes down.

The Joker will scare the nacho cheese stains out of your brand new jeans on July 18, 2008!

In the meantime, please help yourself to lots of other Batman news right here.