Danger of Gray Areas: The Hawkeye Initiative and Escher Girls

I am a supporter of both The Hawkeye Initiative and Escher Girls. I believe there is a problem with poorly drawn or conceived sexy images that ultimately lack sexual awareness and empowerment for females but I believe there is ultimately an issue with both projects.

Escher Girls was created to catalogue these images and expanded to occasionally post redraws submitted by the followers. The Hawkeye Initiative was created based on the idea by GingerHaze aka Noelle Stevenson to “fix every Strong Female Character pose in superhero comics (by) replacing(sic) the character with Hawkeye doing the same thing.

But we come to the issue with any submitted art – what is ultimately a Strong Female Character pose. Internet artist Dredsina brought up a point about this piece by tumblr user i-am-albie.

Women of Marvel Cover Hawkeye Redraw by I-Am-Albie

The original art was created by Sara Pichelli and it is female empowering. The women are all confident, they have character and personality in their looks. This is not what needs to be made fun of!

While the fan art is good, making fun of this goes against the entire idea by reaching the dangerous gray area.

Similarly this piece based on Tank Girl art! Tank Girl is a female character who is strong but she is as far from a stereotypical strong female character as you can get! She is a female character who is strong and confident in her sexuality. This is a fundamental misunderstand of the idea.

Making fun of this seems to make the point that any woman who dresses revealingly is non-feminist which is incredibly wrong.

While there is art out there to be made fun of, please don’t confuse the points and muddy the waters because we still need to stop this:

And this is a great tool to use.

Luke Herr

Luke is a writer and an aspiring professional comic writer who is also the editor in chief of Nerdcenaries. He currently is working on a graphic novel called Prison Spaceship.

2 thoughts to “Danger of Gray Areas: The Hawkeye Initiative and Escher Girls”

  1. I actually agree with you. I wouldn’t consider the Tank Girl picture an issue either. I reblogged the Women of Marvel picture because I thought the result was funny and creative, and part of the point of my blog is to make people laugh and have fun, but I also understand if some people thought it meant something else. 🙁

    1. Hey Ami, I reblogged the picture from you for the same reason but I think there is some level of misunderstanding from some people on what the problem is.

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