ECHO

When the Phoenix Force came back to Earth hunting for a new host, it did not hold auditions. It staged a tournament in Avengers Vol. 8 #40–44 (2021), handing sparks of its cosmic fire to heroes and villains alike and letting them fight for the whole flame. Among the champions was Maya Lopez, called Echo — a deaf street-level fighter from Daredevil's world whose only power was copying any movement she had ever seen. In her first bout she drew Namor, the Sub-Mariner, and the Phoenix set the fight at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, in the one arena where the king of Atlantis could not lose.

Namor beat her and left her for dead on the ocean floor, and the tournament moved on without her. But the Phoenix was not scoring wins. It had power to spare; what it was looking for was someone who knew how to fall and refuse to stay down. Echo's suffering, and her refusal to die alone in the dark at the bottom of the sea, drew the firebird back to her. It raised her from the seafloor and chose the tournament's first loser as its host.

Risen, Echo crossed the globe and pulled the Phoenix sparks out of every champion still fighting — out of Black Panther and Captain America, out of She-Hulk and the Red Widow — until only Namor's share remained. She took his too, in a rematch that left the Sub-Mariner crawling across dry land in search of the sea. In Avengers Vol. 8 #44, Maya Lopez named herself for the Thunderbird of her Cheyenne ancestors and spoke the words no street fighter was ever meant to say: I am the Phoenix.