As Carole Stabile has suggested, “superhero narratives provide important places for imagining different here-and-nows; for defamiliarizing social problems and exploring them in a context that offers fresh insights and radical visions of the future.” (40) The Hawkeye Initiative is one of many notable spaces in which this defamiliarization and reimagining is occurring within comic-book culture. And there has been a tangible, transformative impact of these sorts of “initiatives,” in the turn toward more pragmatic costuming for Batgirl and Spider-Woman in 2014. (41) But, as we celebrate the transformative potentiality of crossplay fan art for comic-book culture, we must remain mindful of the term's legal origins and the protection that it offers fans who produce satirical or critical creative works based on copyrighted content. In August 2014, the Tumblr site Escher Girls received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice from comic artist Randy Queen, on the grounds of copyright infringement and defamation. (42) Escher Girls, which in name evokes the confounding constructions of M. C. Escher in its discussion of representations of the female form, has a similar mission to The Hawkeye Initiative, though with an emphasis on critically analyzing comics images (in addition to other media) rather than on producing fan-art parodies. (43) More than just an attack on fair-use doctrine or transformative fan criticism, and despite the fact that Queen ultimately retracted the legal threat and apologized, this incident suggests that feminist critiques of gendered superhero iconography, and their efforts to imagine a different here-and-now for comics culture, are still in danger of being taken down, even as they're pinned up. (158)
