Previous to an actual “Batman” existing, there are references to Bruce apparently knowing what he generally wants to be, but without a clear idea of a gimmick. In this, we can kinda imagine that there are a lot of “first drafts” of Bruce just workshopping ideas previous to Year One.

The First one here almost seems like a Dr. Mid-Nite kinda thing, but maybe it can just be that Bruce knew what he wanted, but it was so far un-themed.

The latter of the two is a Bob Kane “illustration” of who Batman would be. The idea of Batman’s visual aspect that we’re familiar with really comes from Bill Finger. In any case, we can just pretend that Bruce drew this while trying to figure out who he was going to be. He just also happened to rely on his education to visualise Da Vinci’s flying machine to help him get around.

We can also piece together that Bruce was trying to modify and augment the Batsuit as he encountered issues. Some suits are lighter, some more heavily armored/padded. Some suits are really basic and some are a little more complicated. It just kinda evolves over time when new issues are encountered.

YEAR One

The Early Batman looks are shown in a variety of ways. What one can imagine is that there’s a basic look to Batman’s early days, but it evolves slightly when new needs arise. So, the suit is represented simply at first, as an amalgam of all these representations, modifying during Zero Year, and then adapting the lessons learned from that into post-Zero Year suit.