WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Phoenix Song: Echo #1, available now from Marvel.
The Phoenix Force has a new host in the Marvel Universe in the form of the upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe hero Echo. Even though Maya Lopez spent almost all of her superhero career thus far as a street-level hero and Daredevil ally, a tournament between the Avengers ended with her bonding with the cosmic force.
In Phoenix Song: Echo #1, by Rebecca Roanhorse, Luca Maresca, and Carlos Lopez, the young Marvel hero starts to come to terms with the power that she now wields. After this issue sees Echo grossly overpowered against a group of unpowered street criminals, it teases a confrontation with one of the few entities near the Phoenix’s power level, the ancient X-Men villain known simply as the Adversary.
When Echo returns to the tribal land where she spent the best days of her youth, she encounters Riverwalker, a storyteller with the power to look back through a person’s ancestral line. He offers Maya a dire warning about an oncoming battle with a spreading “shadow” who is known to the other people of the area. River also says that only the power of the Phoenix can stop him.
As solicitations for future issues confirm, that villain is the Adversary, one of the more challenging villains Marvel’s mutants ever faced. Created by Chris Claremont and John Romita Jr in 1984’s Uncanny X-Men #188, the Adversary is a magical entity with a seemingly limitless amount of power that wants to destroy the universe and create a new one in its place.
With a history that seemingly pre-dates the birth of the Marvel Universe, the Adversary is most commonly associated with the Cheyenne and the X-Men’s Forge, who spent years of shamanic training to stop him. During 1988’s seminal “Fall of the Mutants” event, the Adversary captured the multiversal goddess Roma and launched an attack on Earth based in Dallas, Texas. With help from Roma, the X-Men seemingly died to give Forge the energy he needed to defeat the Adversary for good in Chris Claremont and Marc Silvestri’s Uncanny X-Men #227. Since then, the Adversary has returned on a few occasions, but he’s usually been dealt with by Forge or a mystically empowered Storm.
Given his close connection to the Adversary, Forge’s appearance earlier in Phoenix Song takes on a dramatically different light. He and several of the other X-Men are openly dubious about the Phoenix taking on a new host who’s not a mutant, and he even tries to separate Echo from the Phoenix in this issue. However, the Adversary is one of the only threats that could compel Forge to work with Echo, and seeing her take on the Adversary alone would go a long way in assuaging his -- and the rest of the X-Men’s -- fears about a human Phoenix host.
While Echo has a respectable career as a vigilante, the Adversary could give her the exact kind of challenge she needs to show the Marvel Universe that she’s capable of handling the power of the Phoenix.