In 2021 she made the borg annual list of Kick-Ass Genre Heroines.  Alaqua Cox’s sympathetic villain Maya Lopez aka Echo could do it all without the use of her hearing and aided by a prosthetic leg.  Mainstream audiences first met her in the Disney/Marvel series Hawkeye (reviewed here).  A fairly new character in Marvel Comics (created for a Daredevil story in 1999), she’s getting her own series called Echo in January (check out the first trailer for it below), but to get ready for the series let’s go back for a moment to 2018.

A new PlayStation 4/Insomniac action-adventure game arrived that September–Marvel’s Spider-Man–and we previewed a new prequel novel as part of a big rollout of Marvel paperback novels.  In Spider-Man: Hostile Takeover (reviewed here), author David Liss put together a densely packed story finding Spider-Man confronting Wilson “Kingpin of Crime” Fisk seven years after he first tried to put the mobster in jail and eight years after Peter first donned his supersuit.  The story pitted Peter Parker and his alter ego Spider-Man against more than Fisk–with criminals old and new taking a crack at Spidey in the hefty paperback’s 398 pages.  And that’s where Echo comes into the picture.

Liss focused on Peter Parker adjusting to life after high school and college, after his Daily Bugle photographer days and years of taking on supervillains, in the workforce as a scientist–yet the angsty Parker was still the same everyguy struggling to balance listening to the needs of girlfriend Mary Jane, keeping his difficult supervisor at work happy, remembering his breakfast meet-ups with Aunt May (did someone say wheatcakes?), and saving the people of New York.  Yep, he still mostly fell short.  Although Fisk was the Big Bad in this tale, others were lurking, like Mayor Norman Osborn, Scorpion, Shocker, Tombstone, Electro, the most vile J. Jonah Jameson yet, and Martin Li (aka Mr. Negative).  But Spidey’s strangest riddle involved new threats, including a Spider-Man doppelganger called Blood-Spider, an imbalanced foe who thinks he’s the real Spider-Man (unfortunately for Spidey, he had the moves and webs to prove it), and a masked deaf woman who calls herself Echo, with mad martial arts skills and a hidden past.  If you want a better introduction to Echo than you saw in Hawkeye, you’ll want to read Spider-Man: Hostile Takeover.

Here is the first trailer for the new Echo series, which will also feature the return of both Charlie Cox (not related) as Daredevil and Vincent D’Onofrio as Kingpin:

You can order the Echo novel, Spider-Man: Hostile Takeover, now here at Amazon.  All ten episodes of Echo, the series, arrive January 10, 2024, on both Disney+ and Hulu.