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Fan studies' preoccupation with fan art has never fully manifested into a robust theorization of the area. That is to say, although fans' transformative works have long been central to both fandom and the study of fans, fan scholars have paid disproportionate attention to fan fiction and fan vids as objects of study.1 The relative lack of scholarship on fan art (which, broadly defined, would include fan drawing and painting, as well as digital image manipulations, mash-ups, and even potentially animated GIFs) is particularly confounding given fan culture's migration to platforms like Tumblr that trade in spreadable fan-produced imagery. Through an analysis of one transformative superhero fan art site, The Hawkeye Initiative, I contend that it is especially vital that we consider the place, and transformative potential, of fan art within comics fan culture. Although fan texts are in no way medium specific (e.g., one might write textual fanfic about an audiovisual fan object, like a television show), the sequential art form of comics lends itself to both a proliferation of fan art and a more robust collection of terminology and texts to theorize it.
The Hawkeye Initiative is a crowdsourced fan-art site, founded in December 2012 on a simple premise: "How to fix every Strong Female Character pose in superhero comics: replace the character with Hawkeye doing the same thing."2 The "initiative" referenced in the site's title is to "illustrate how deformed, hyper-sexualized, and impossibly contorted women are commonly illustrated in comics" by redrawing comic-book panels featuring superheroines with the Marvel character a broader trend in comics fan art toward genderswapped renderings of characters as a mode of transformative intervention, "turning the male gaze of comic book culture back on itself and Clint "Hawkeye" Barton while retaining the superheroine's hypersexualized costume and pose (Figure 1).3 The site aims to be not just illustrative but also transformative: a "way that people can express the desire for [a change in the extreme sexism of modern comics] in a way that is both compelling and fun."4 Similarly, I position The Hawkeye Initiative as illustrative of holding the industry accountable for the paltry number of women being hired to work on mainstream superhero titles."5 Though my focus is on Figure 1. A typical example of the transformative fan...