Alternative Costume Designs for Cass Cain as Black Bat

I just picked up the trade for the first volume of Batman Inc., Vol. 1 and noticed in the back that they had some small images of Chris Burnham’s design work for Cass Cain including some detail work. Chris was nice enough to send me some higher res images of his initial designs and I though you might like to see them.

Cass Cain’s original costume, featuring a full mask with no eye holes or mouth holes was introduced in No Man’s Land. In story the costume and mask were designed by Helena Bertinelli who chose to give the Gotham a “Batman” after Bruce hightailed it out of town following the government closing the city. At first the mask did have open eye and mouth holes but Helena closed them after taking some paint in the face.

A version of the costume on the right go handed over to Cass when she and Bruce parted ways and he and Oracle made her the new Batgirl.

Cass wore that costume until handing it over to Stephanie Brown in the first issue of Batgirl #1, volume 2.

The character was then put in limbo until she showed up in Red Robin wearing another costume which looked like Rob Liefeld redesigning the Secret Six’s Scandal Savage.

Cass Cain was then put in a bit of limbo again (Limbo should be the character’s middle name) until she was selected by Grant Morrison to be a member of Batman, Inc.

Cass made her debut in Batman, Inc. #6 as Black Bat and at that time Chris Burnham chatted a bit about the costume the character was now wearing.

I redesigned her based on Grant’s description. If memory serves, he was pretty specific about the cape but left me to figure out the rest of it. The challenge was to make people say “Hey… is that Cassandra Cain?”

One thing he spent some time on was figuring out what Cass would wear on her face. There are 8 different versions:

The final selection was #8 although I also like #6.

There were also some different designs for the costume:

The one on the left looks like an update of her previous Batgirl costume. Here’s the final design:

Here is the how the final costume appeared in comics

Despite the costume appearing in very few issues and a mini-series, Gates of Gotham, before the character was “benched” from comics, the costume proved to be very popular with cosplayers. Here is a small sample.

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