of protection for his head against firearms. The front of the skull and the sides of the temples also have small armor inserts to increase the effectiveness of skull strikes (head butts) and protect from concussive blows. Repeated encounters with the Mad Hatter also forced Batman to shield his cowl against the villain's mind control. Its basic design has remained unchanged, however, it has been frequently updated for Batman's needs. Batman: The Brave and the Bold shows that the cowl's ears are able to change lengths for various uses in. However, artist Karl Kerchl has drawn Batman's costume vault showing that he has a wide selection of masks with ears of different lengths. Despite that, Dick Grayson's cowl supposedly has the same features as Bruce Wayne's, although Grayson often finds that wearing it interferes with his peripheral vision (although, as Grayson primarily wore a domino mask through his career, this could simply mean he is unused to the cowl). In Batman: Cacophony, during Batman's hunt with the masked serial killer Onomatopoeia, he reinforced one of his masks with a secondary armor beneath its kevlar headpiece with bloodpack lining in anticipation of being shot in the skull, to create an opportunity to fake his own death to get himself closer to the villain. This was based on assassin Deadshot's helmet designs. Gloves Batman is often depicted as wearing dark-colored gloves which extend to cover most of his forearms. In the earliest Batman stories of Detective Comics, the costume featured a few curiosities before it evolved in to its more or less standard style. The first gloves were purple in color, ordinary looking, and lacked any sort of scalloped fins or other stylings, and only came to the wrists. The second Batman adventure depicted the character wearing no gloves at all. A few issues later the gloves became longer, and by 1940 the familiar fins were added. In early stories, these fins originally resembled miniature, scalloped bat wings, but eventually became three simple triangular fins. In some later incarnations, the scallops are attached to a separated bracer worn below the glove around the wrist. In Batman Begins these bracers are part of the costume Wayne wore during his League of Shadows training, painted black – this set are hard enough to slice Ra's al Ghul's sword into many pieces. The scallops typically serve a defensive purpose and are used to defend against