SPLICED LIFE /
COLUMN
ISSUE 02
Once upon a time there was a little film called The Avengers and
it starred a team of beloved and well-known Superheroes, whose
mission pretty much construed smashing things whilst being
superheroic. This film also had a poster, with its manly male stars
posing mightily, gazing broodily or being angry and its solo female
protagonist facing the other way and showing us her boobs and
butt and the same time (quite a talent Black Widow has there).
The Internet (being the sentient thing that it is)
blazed with an almighty rage that Joss Whedon,
champion of well-written and generally pretty
awesome female characters, allowed for such a
stereotypical exponent of a typical male's view of
female comic characters (that being a walking set
of breasts and booty). That rage lasted a good few
hours until the Internet became distracted with
humorous pictures of kittens and it moved on, with
the exception of one artist named Kevin Bolk. In
a stroke of glorious satire, Bolk created a gem of a
reactionary poster
In an instance of glorious subversion, Bolk gave
us the mightily objectified Avengers and a Black
Widow staring rather curiously at Hawkeye's
sumptuous derriere. This echoed a rather curiously
growing sentiment on Tumblr, the cornucopia of
all things sarcastic and pop-culture related in a
post by user Gingerhaze: "how to fix every Strong
Female Character pose in superhero comics:
replace the character with Hawkeye doing the
same thing". Hawkeye had made it into the sights
(terrible pun... bad Ray) of the Internet and hilarity
was soon to follow.
02
Thus the Hawkeye Initiative was born, a repository
of comical (another bad pun... seriously?) takes
on Hawkeye wearing his female contemporaries'
costumes, or simply objectified versions of his own
costume. I was so inspired by the rather fantastic
message of this group that I made the decision
to do something that would inadvertently result
in a rather interesting revolution, some severe
discomfort and quite a lot of groping - I cosplayed
as Hawkeye