Echo

One bad day at the wrong place changes everything. Echo opens with photographer Julie Martin standing in the desert when an explosion rains liquid metal from the sky — and a sliver of the glowing alloy fuses to her skin. It turns out the metal is the remains of a top-secret weaponized battle suit, a prototype nuclear device powerful enough to end civilization. Now Julie is the most wanted woman in the world: a living warhead being hunted by the military, a corporate conspiracy, and the machine itself.

The story

Julie is an ordinary, smart-mouthed, deeply human protagonist who never asked for superpowers — and doesn’t get off easy when she acquires them. The suit makes her unpredictably powerful and nearly invulnerable, but it also carries something darker: the psyche of Annie, the brilliant scientist murdered for creating the alloy. As the two women share one body, Annie’s consciousness guides Julie toward a terrifying truth — that her invention, tested through the massive Phi Super-Collider, could tear a black hole into the heart of the Earth.

What follows is a breathless chase across the American Southwest as Julie, Annie, and a ragtag group of allies take on the military-industrial machine, with the fate of the entire planet riding on whether Julie can reach the collider before the test begins.

Publication history and acclaim

Written, drawn, and lettered by Terry Moore and published through his Abstract Studio imprint, Echo ran 30 issues from March 2008 to June 2011 and was collected into six volumes before being gathered in a complete softcover edition and a hardcover omnibus. Inspired by the Large Hadron Collider and real advances in particle physics, it was praised by the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction for its “well-rounded characters and occasional doses of humour” and won the Harvey Award for Best New Series. Julie and her pursuer Ivy Raven later joined the all-hands crossover Five Years, cementing their place in the interconnected Terryverse alongside Strangers in Paradise.

Perfect for fans of RASL by Jeff Smith, the paranoid technothriller intensity of Altered Carbon, and high-concept sci-fi with a fiercely human heart.