If you’re a Marvel fan – be it comics, movies, or television shows – and you’ve been active on the internet in the past few months, you may have noticed a new feminist phenomenon sweeping through your newsfeeds and dashboards. As you may have already read in this post about comic book women, breasts and bums are often the focus of entire panels and covers. The Hawkeye Initiative takes offense at that, and is fighting back, one illustration at a time.

The Hawkeye Initiative started when tumblr-user and artist Blue decided to switch the Hawkeye and Black Widow poses on a comic book cover. Blue’s fellow tumblr-er… Gingerhaze then decided that

“to fix every Strong Female Character pose in superhero comics… [you should] replace the character with Hawkeye doing the same thing.”

This just seems… right.

The internet response was almost instantaneous, and sparked quite a bit of controversy with some folks. Just read the comments on io9’s article that only discusses that fact that the Initiative exists. Many other websites bring it up, some with many negative comments and some with positive feedback. What I really love about the Hawkeye Initiative is that it shows how ridiculous and sometimes downright impossible the poses that women are put into just to be sexualized for comics. Don’t get me wrong though, women aren’t the only ones being drawn very peculiarly… 

Captain, when did you take more of the serum? Your muscles have grown even more huge!

Another great trend that this has started, is the Hawkeye Initiative cosplays. One very famous and favored cosplay is that of Blatsuura, who has become a pretty big deal around the web.

Hawkeye has a very popular bum.

 And he isn’t the only male cosplayer going out on a limb here – many others are “crossplaying” (dressing as the opposite sex for costume), or creating a male version of an existing female character to dress up as. The fact that these artists and feminists and cosplayers all came together on the internet to create something like this gives me hope that maybe one day all comics won’t be drawn for sexualized women to grace  their pages, but for the women in the pages to be graceful and sexy for saving the world, and not showing their cleavage. Here are some extra links that I thought you’d like: The Hawkeye Initiative, and a really interesting blog post.