snap judgments

Hey, remember Echo?

Sure, we all do!  She’s that really cool Native American chick who’s deaf and was intro’d by David Mack and given this really interesting story about identity and overcoming your past and had some fantastic art and oh yeah, she’s Ronin.  Ah well, it was a good idea while it lasted and at the end of her story in the New Avengers, ‘Ronin’ was left to keep track of the Japanese Underground.  It was as if Cap realized how bad an idea it was to have this very lithe and limber chick in a thick padded dude suit and said ‘Wait, just… stay here, we’ll come back, really.’

And they did this very issue!  …. eventually.  It take a ‘Dear John’ letter to Daredevil to remind them they put an agent out the Japan, only instead of a break-up, this a special email sent in the case of her enevitable death.  She rambles, just to make sure the readers caught up on what she’s doing.  She explains the reason for the dude suit, which was an ‘homage’ to Daredevil the first hero who touched her life.  She gets a little smug over how well it worked to disguise who she was.  In a display similar to bickering parents, the Avengers are her friends when they invite her into the fold and Matt’s friends when they abandon her out into the Japanese Underground.

Doing her enemies a disservice and making her job a bit of a joke,  Echo explains that the Japanese Underground consists of slick criminals looking to get high or get laid and a bunch of Paris Hilton types, arm candy airhead heiresses.  So, Echo decides to play the ditzy party girl by day, then dress up as a bad ass ninja dude by night.  Let me say that again:  she pretends to be a stupid woman by day to get info, then dresses up as a man to intimidate and kick ass on the info she gets.  Does that sound a little… odd to anyone else?  Anyways, since she knows martial arts and is in Japan, she’s going to run into the Hand.

This brought about an interesting revelation at work:  one ninja is bad ass.  A bunch of ninjas is fodder.  So the old addage about ’strength in numbers’ doesn’t work for ninja-ry.

Ronin fights a lot of ninjas.  She fights Elektra and, unsurprisingly, loses.  Because Elektra loves irony, she kills Ronin with a sai through the stomach as Bullseye once killed her.  And maybe to follow through on that irony, Elektra takes her back to the Hand for the resurrection ceremony which suceeds just in time for, your friend and mine, BRAINWASHING!  I thought that was the scene for Hydra right now, but I guess the Hand need all the help they can get.  As they toss the brought-back-from-the-dead Echo into a deep dark hole to face some sort of really scary mystical blue thing, her email to Matt Murdock begs him not to suffer this very fate.  She wants to be… avenged.

Enter the splash page!  Yep, before the end of Civil War, here’s the new guys busting out of the pages to fight ninjas.  Again.  Sadly, my fears are realized as Doctor Strange seems mostly there to wiggle his fingers and play designated driver, teleporting them in and out as Matt Murdock must have forwarded the email to the correct people.  There’s banter as they fight the ninjas and Luke Cage kicks Elektra in the tuna fish for Matt (old times’s sake I guess).  Spider-Man grabs Echo, still wonky from the resurrection and whatever brainwashing that took hold, and *poof* they’re gone.  Elektra swears they won’t leave Japan, making me wonder what would keep the SORCERER SUPREME from going back to his Sanctum Sanctorum.

Details, I suppose.  All in all, it feels like we’ve done this dance before and it wasn’t all that thrilling the last time either.   Don’t waste your money, this was merely filler as we all wait for Civil War #7 to show up.