Echo Fact — November 6, 2026

Today's Fact

She went to Japan to finish the Hand. Instead the Hand finished her, rebuilt her, and aimed her at her own rescuers.

ECHO WAS KILLED BY AN ELEKTRA WHO WASN'T ELEKTRA — THEN CAME BACK AND KILLED HER RIGHT BACK!

The Featured Fact

Operating in Japan, Maya Lopez crossed blades with the Hand and with the woman leading it, Elektra — and lost. Elektra killed her. But the Hand does not waste a useful corpse: as told across New Avengers Vol. 1 #27–31 (2007), the ninja order resurrected Echo the same way it had once tried to raise Elektra herself, then set about scrubbing her mind clean and refilling it with obedience.

So when the New Avengers stormed Japan to rescue their teammate, the teammate attacked them. Brainwashed Echo fought the very people who had come for her and drove a sword through Doctor Strange — the sorcerer who was mid-rescue. Strange survived by slipping out of his wounded body into astral form, and from there he reached into her head and burned the Hand's control out of it.

Freed, Echo turned around and did to “Elektra” what “Elektra” had done to her: she stabbed and disembowelled the Hand's leader in the middle of the battle. Then the corpse changed. In front of the whole team, dead Elektra melted back into a green-skinned Skrull — the first hard proof the Avengers ever held that shape-shifting infiltrators were already living inside their world wearing familiar faces.

Why It's Obscure

A death, a resurrection with strings attached, and a green corpse that told the Avengers their war had already started.

Raised to be owned

The Hand's house style — the order that dug Echo up had run the same play on Elektra years earlier: raise a brilliant killer, wipe the inconvenient parts, keep the weapon.

The sorcerer's wound

Strange took the sword meant for his patient — stabbed through the chest while trying to save her, he finished the rescue as a ghost, working from outside his own bleeding body.

The impostor problem

Nobody in that fight was who she claimed to be — Echo was playing the Hand's puppet, and the Hand's queen was an alien wearing Elektra's face, name and skills.

Fallout

One green corpse rewired the Marvel Universe — Echo's kill gave the heroes their first Skrull body, and the question it raised — who else has been replaced? — detonated into Secret Invasion.

Gallery

Echo in her street-fighter colours, the sorcerer she stabbed mid-rescue, and Echo again — proof the woman the Hand rebuilt did not stay built to order.

Echo Maya Lopez in comic art — **The copyist, in colour**Maya Lopez as Echo — photographic reflexes, a lip-reader's focus, and a fighter who can reproduce any move she has seen exactly once.

Doctor Strange Marvel comics — **The rescuer she ran through**Doctor Strange, the team-mate Echo stabbed while the Hand was still steering her hands — he freed her mind from his astral form before his body gave out.

Echo as Ronin in black and gold costume — **Back from the dead, on her own side**Echo restored to herself: the Avengers who flew to Japan to recover a corpse came home with a team-mate — and a warning.

Sources

Every fact on this page was checked against at least two independent sources before publication.

Bullpen Bulletins

Marvel Database — New Avengers Vol. 1 #31 The Japan rescue: Echo, freed by Strange, kills ‘Elektra’, whose body reverts to a Skrull in front of the team.
CBR — 10 Things You Didn't Know About Echo Echo murdered by Elektra, resurrected and brainwashed by the Hand, used against the New Avengers, and freed by Doctor Strange.
SpiderFan — New Avengers Vol. 1 #31 review Issue-by-issue account of Strange freeing Echo from Hand control and Echo killing the Skrull Elektra.