Everything To Know About Echo From Hawkeye

In Marvel’s new Disney+ series Hawkeye, Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) reluctantly teams up with eager 22-year-old archer Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) in order to face down enemies from his past. Many of them are likely connected to his actions in Avengers: Endgame when — after losing his family — he slunk into the shadows and began enacting vengeful murders on criminals around the world as a mercenary named Ronin. Now, the repercussions are catching up to him.

Notably, though, Clint isn’t the only Marvel character to have taken up the mantle of Ronin. Echo, aka Maya Lopez, actually originated the identity in the comics before passing it off to Clint. The character, who is canonically deaf, is is slated to make her live-action debut in Hawkeye. She’s played by Alaqua Cox, a deaf and Native American actor set to lead her own spinoff series, Echo, as part of Phase Four in the MCU. So it’s safe to assume she’ll play a significant role both in Hawkeye and in later Marvel properties.

Created by writer David Mack and artist Joe Quesada and first introduced in Daredevil #9 in 1999, Echo is a martial artist, marksman, and acrobat capable of perfectly copying another person’s movements (hence the “Echo” nickname). According to Games Radar, she started out in the comics as an antagonist for Daredevil. After Kingpin — the famed Marvel villain known as a ruthless underworld boss — murdered her father, he took Echo in and raised her as his own daughter. Under Kingpin’s influence, she grew up blaming Daredevil for her father’s death and vowed to kill him. In the comics, she adorns her face with a handprint that resembles the bloody handprint her father left on her face before his death.

On her quest for revenge, Echo begins a relationship with Matt Murdock unaware that he and Daredevil are one of the same. She stops short of killing him upon realizing the truth, instead turning on Kingpin and shooting him. She then flees the country and returns to find that Matt has moved on, while Kingpin is in prison after surviving his injuries. Kingpin forgives Echo, and she leaves again, later crossing paths with Moon Knight and the Avengers.

Given that Daredevil hasn’t yet made an official appearance in the modern MCU, it’s unclear what role Echo will play in Hawkeye. But expect her history as a swordsman to definitely come into play.

As for the Echo spinoff, it was ordered to series in November, just over a week before Hawkeye’s premiere. The show is expected to begin filming in the next couple of months, but don’t expect to see it onscreen anytime soon. "We're treating our shows as if we're making our features," Hawkeye producer Trinh Tran previously told Comicbook.com. "I mean, the feel and the quality of those TV shows are going to be like the Marvel movies that you've seen. So that's always been [Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige]'s mindset of let's make sure that when people are going to be watching these episodes, it's going to feel like it's just one long movie except rather than two-and-a-half hours, it's going to be much longer. And the idea behind certain characters getting their shows is because we'll have a lot more time to be able to develop these characters rather than the shorter."