Echo: The Complete Edition: A review

A casual look at Terry Moore’s graphic novels or how-to-draw books might lead one to the conclusion that Moore loves to draw women. All of Moore’s three series, published through his own imprint, Abstract Studio , feature strong and shapely female heroines, and he has also published books on how to draw women and beauty.

A more critical eye on Moore’s books and his imprint’s website (adorned as it is with his own mostly pinup-style femmes in various states of undress) will conclude that Moore loves to draw women in their underpants.

If you’re looking for a graphic novelist who doesn’t fetishize the female form, then Moore is probably not that artist. To be fair, not all of Moore’s women look like Jessica Rabbit, and their body dimensions are fairly realistic; however, there is plenty of the bombshell or vixen archetype built into each character.

Of course, those archetypes pervade comics as a genre, not simply Moore’s work. In the world of comics, Moore is clearly not the worst offender in this regard. Suffice it to say that the comic industry, still very much dominated by male authors and artists, often struggles to portray strength and power in women without at the same time sexualizing those traits through familiar visual tropes.

Those problems notwithstanding, Echo: The Complete Edition still has much to recommend it. In many ways, the treatment of women by Moore the writer is more complex and nuanced than one would expect from Moore the artist. Indeed, Echo is an ambitious and compelling story about three very powerful and thoughtful women whose lives intersect in unconventional ways. It is also an exploration of the relationship between pure and applied science, as well as of the forces—in this case mainly corporate and military—that act to define that relationship in today’s world.

Echo is primarily the story of attractive photographer and soon-to-be divorcée Julie Martin. Julie’s life takes an unexpected turn when she drives her truck out to a desert lake for a photo shoot. Unbeknownst to Julie, a classified research project involving a new plutonium-based alloy is being tested in her vicinity. High above her a second woman, Annie Trotter, is testing a flight suit made from the experimental alloy that she helped to develop at the nearby Heitzer Nuclear Research Institute (HeNRI). When Annie’s own bosses decide to shoot her out of the sky during the test flight, she dies and the suit breaks apart and falls to the ground in pellets like so many drops of rain.

The pellets fall onto Julie and agglomerate over her chest to become what looks like a form-fitting chrome brassiere. The alloy bonds with her skin and taps into her nervous system, giving Julie several new abilities that she cannot seem to control. The abilities are bipolar: On the one hand, the alloy can be incredibly destructive when it intuits the need to defend its host; on the other hand, it can be therapeutic, healing and even reversing aging in those whom Julie physically embraces and feels empathy for. Intent on exploiting the alloy for its more destructive uses, operatives from HeNRI pursue Julie, giving her many opportunities to use her new powers. (As if Julie didn’t already have enough problems, every time the alloy is used defensively it disintegrates her clothing, leaving her constantly topless and in need of a new shirt.)

A third woman enters the story when HeNRI hires clandestine agent Ivy Raven to track Julie down and recover the alloy. Rather than attack Julie, as the army and HeNRI tend to do, Ivy instead tries to understand Julie’s personality and motivations, and uses this understanding to gain Julie’s trust. Besides being an intuitive tracker, human lie detector, and hard-as-nails field operative, Ivy is also a mother. When her own daughter becomes sick and needs the alloy’s powers to recover her hearing, Ivy becomes even more involved in Julie’s life and in the fight against her employers (and in the constant struggle to keep Julie clothed).

But it is Annie, the physicist who created the alloy, who is responsible for its powers and its behavior. Through the testimony of Annie’s colleagues, we learn that she developed a unified theory by replacing the base-10 system with a base-ϕ system (ϕ being the golden ratio), which allowed her to manipulate the alloy. And when she died, Annie’s DNA and consciousness were incorporated into the alloy.

Through Annie’s posthumous interactions via the alloy and Julie’s subconscious, we learn that Annie developed the alloy with the intention of using its healing properties to help the world. Annie’s revelations and Ivy’s investigation ultimately lead to the discovery that Annie was killed for resisting her bosses’ shortsighted plan to place the alloy into a bomb or an accelerator. The women alone seem to understand that either use would create a black hole big enough to destroy the world. To prevent the catastrophe, Julie, Annie, and Ivy must race against the clock to a remote military accelerator in Alaska.

As in most science fiction, one must suspend a good deal of disbelief in order to enjoy Echo. The book contains a heady blend of science and pseudoscience, math and pseudomath. The author occasionally shows his naïveté about science and the way research is structured – for example, Moore doesn’t seem to know that the US Atomic Energy Commission ceased to exist in 1974. Indeed, many of Moore’s scientific influences are old ones; several issues begin with quotations from Albert Einstein or J. Robert Oppenheimer.

But those shortcomings should not get in the way of enjoying what is, in fact, a well-told story. Although Moore plays it fast and loose with the scientific and technical details, he is much more attentive to the themes. Despite some problematic elements in the way gender is treated—for the most part the female and male characters are divided respectively along the lines of creators/destroyers, healers/aggressors, and questioners/asserters—the book nonetheless manages to present some very three-dimensional characters.

Matthew Shindell is a historian of science and an ethnographer. He is currently an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego.