Who is Marvel’s Echo and how is she one of the universe’s most powerful people in the comics?

Though the initiative was first launched to give solo spin-offs to Marvel heroes from the movies (the Scarlet Witch, Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes, Loki, and Hawkeye), Disney+’s MCU shows spent all of last year introducing whole new characters (Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, and She-Hulk) in their very own bespoke spin-offs. Now we’re getting a fun combination of the two, with Alaqua Cox’s Echo getting her own show after debuting in Hawkeye.

But who is Echo? What’s her whole deal? And how is she now one of the most powerful people in the entire universe in Marvel’s comics?

Live-action history

The answer to those first two questions can easily be answered by watching Hawkeye, which serves as an origin story for Echo—real name Maya Lopez—as much as it is an origin story for Hayley Steinfeld’s Kate Bishop. In Hawkeye, Maya is the leader of the so-called Tracksuit Mafia, a gang of fairly low-rent criminals serving under the throne of none other than Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin. Maya is deaf and uses a prosthetic leg, and she was raised by both her criminal father and Fisk (who treats her as his own daughter and is enormously protective of her).

When Clint Barton, in his Ronin disguise, was on his post-snap quest to murder as many criminals as he could (as seen in Avengers: Endgame), Maya’s father was among those he killed. That set her off on a lifelong mission to get revenge and kill Ronin, who she doesn’t realize is also the arrow-slinging Avenger Hawkeye. Over the course of the show, Maya realizes that there was more to her father’s death than she thought, with Kingpin himself being partially responsible. In the finale, she seemingly shoots and kills him, but that’s definitely not what happened because he’ll pop up in the Echo series.

Comic-book origins

Echo was created by David Mack and Joe Quesada in the comics, where she was a supporting character in Daredevil books. Her backstory is similar, with the Kingpin treating young Maya as his daughter after he’s involved in the death of her father, but rather than blaming Clint Barton, Kingpin tells her that Daredevil is the one responsible. Unfortunately for ol’ Hornhead, Echo is a master martial artist and has “photographic reflexes,” which is to say that she can perfectly replicate an opponent’s fighting styles just by watching them (creating an “echo” of what they can do).

She tries to kill Daredevil but then realizes that the Kingpin has been lying to her for her whole life and tries to murder him (she fails, like in Hawkeye). Later, wanting to help fight bad guys but feeling guilty over her past association with the Kingpin, Echo dons a ninja-like disguise and uses the name … Ronin. She works with Luke Cage’s New Avengers for a time and later hands over the Ronin costume and name to … Clint Barton, who uses it as his new superhero identity after Kate Bishop starts calling herself Hawkeye. (The Ronin identity is completely abandoned after a while and both Hawkeyes just agree to be Hawkeye.)

Echo doesn’t do much of anything for several years after that, but in 2020, creators Jason Aaron and Javier Garrón started an arc in their Avengers book called “Enter The Phoenix.” In the arc, the Phoenix Force—the sentient cosmic power that was involved in the death of beloved X-Men member Jean Grey in the iconic Dark Phoenix storyline—has returned to Earth in search of a new host and pits a bunch of heroes and villains against each other in a tournament to find out which one is the most deserving of its power.

Though she gets her butt kicked by Namor, Echo’s refusal to give up and die endears her to the Phoenix Force and it chooses to ignore the results of the tournament and select her anyway, giving her a whole new array of superpowers (telepathy, flight, super-strength, and the ability to shoot fire blasts). Getting Echo to that place required 40 years of comic book plots to come together, which is something that has always been fun about Marvel’s books but would be nearly impossible to replicate in the MCU.

Still, that’s exactly what makes comic book movies fun for people who follow the weird lore of the source material. Maya, as seen in live-action, is a decidedly normal person, and while she’s gone through more than most normal people (few of us are lucky enough to have been parented by the Kingpin), it’s absurd to think of the woman seen in Hawkeye eventually leveling up so high that she could go toe-to-toe with someone like Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel.

Again, that’ll almost definitely never happen in live-action, but some of the groundwork has been laid and that means it maybe could happen. That’s why it’s cool when the MCU expands like this to make room for a relatively smaller character: It sets the stage for new stories and new kinds of stories—not necessarily huge cosmic sagas where the fate of the world hangs in the balance, but just new things we haven’t seen or even thought of before. And that’s something the aging MCU desperately needs.

You can watch Echo starting January 9 on Disney+.