Making her onscreen debut during the events of Hawkeye before quickly securing her own streaming show, Echo is one of the least recognizable Marvel characters to date to land an eponymous series.
Not that that’s a bad thing – plenty of obscure-leaning comic book heroes are overdue for a big budget adaptation. Still, it’s nice to have some background going into these things, and that’s exactly what we’re here to provide.
Echo – real name Maya Lopez – is a relatively fresh face on the Marvel scene, first appearing in Joe Quesada’s run of Daredevil comics in 1999. A lot of the broad strokes of her backstory pop up in Hawkeye. She was born deaf, making her part of a very exclusive hearing impaired superhero club, and is a citizen of the Cheyenne Nation. Her parents are Kingpin associate Willie “Crazy Horse” Lincoln, and an as-yet undisclosed mother.
Echo’s old man was killed by Wilson Fisk, who promised to raise Maya up to be a fine, upstanding distributor of violence. She was sent to a school for kids with special needs, there discovering her superhuman, somehow-not-mutant ability to perfectly replicate the movements of others. After playing a song on the piano despite A: Not being able to play the piano, and B: Again, not being able to hear anything, she changed schools, and trained to be a performer-slash-punching enthusiast. The second part was mostly Kingpin’s idea.
Maya’s journey to heroism: Is there an Echo in here?
If a lot of what follows sounds familiar, it’s because Quesada’s Daredevil stories — the ones that introduced Echo — did a lot of heavy lifting during the writing process for the Ben Affleck movie from 2003. Kingpin being Kingpin, he blamed the death of Maya’s father on Daredevil, eventually sending her out into the world to get the Man Without Fear. The truth came out, and Maya decided to be one of the good guys — albeit a really murdery one — and does a bunch of kissing with Matt Murdoch, as is the fate of all martial artists in skimpy outfits hanging out on Hell’s Kitchen rooftops.
Beyond her Taskmaster-adjacent ability to mimic others, Echo doesn’t have a lot of powers. She’s great at punching and kicking people. She took on the Ronin persona for a while – the one that Clint Barton rocked during Avengers: Endgame. She also got to play host to the Phoenix Force, after a cosmic, inter-superhero Thunderdome battle royale determined who’d be best at keeping a fiery, vengeful genocide bird in their brain. In fairness, basically everybody’s had the Phoenix Force for a while. It’s the Marvel version of getting mono your freshman year.
Meanwhile, Echo’s prosthetic leg in the MCU is an all-new, all-different addition to the character, coming to you honestly, thanks to performer Alaqua Cox’s own real-life missing limb. The decision to include the prosthesis, as well as Marvel’s choice to cast a Deaf actress to portray the character, have been lauded as a win for representation.