Batman
Ok so I've been thinking about this whole batman redesign thing. I tried to come up with a design of my own but I find myself really hitting a wall. The easy way out seemed to be just making it silly as the very concept of superheros in tights is silly. It's especially silly when you have a superhero that takes it's self as seriously as batman. Even to do silly would be a challenge to design anything really compelling as his classic costume is already the definition of silly. Turning away from silly there's trying to look at what batman's costume is supposed to convey, or what qualities of batman you find compelling. Jemma went with terror (http://oxboxer.livejournal.com/43690.html) and turned out a great costume. To me, however, batman as a character has never been about terror alone. In fact I never saw batman as being scary in that sense, more intimidating that scary. I always saw the costume as a maudlin element that bruce uses to confuse criminals. It's that, "what the fuck is going on" moment when the criminal's buddies start being pulled into dark shadows and they catch glimpses of some weird guy in a costume. It's the same fear that you get from a sadistic serial killer, they're not inhuman by any means but the fact they are human that makes them so upsetting. The cum shot of batman sequences is always when theres one guy left, then batman drags him up to the rafters by his ankles and interrogates him upside down, face to face.
This being my particular interpretation of the character, again it becomes clear that altering the costume would be fairly arbitrary. Everything I just described is realized just fine by the current costume. Aside from a practical redesign the only avenues i see left are more re-imaginings such as batman as a ww1 fighter ace, or batman as a french revolutionary, or batman by gaslight, or batman in soviet russia. All of those are fun but they're not really in the same spirit of redesigning the current batman.
so, in conclusion, i gave up.
This being my particular interpretation of the character, again it becomes clear that altering the costume would be fairly arbitrary. Everything I just described is realized just fine by the current costume. Aside from a practical redesign the only avenues i see left are more re-imaginings such as batman as a ww1 fighter ace, or batman as a french revolutionary, or batman by gaslight, or batman in soviet russia. All of those are fun but they're not really in the same spirit of redesigning the current batman.
so, in conclusion, i gave up.