“Women don’t build empires…they decorate them.” For me, with that one chauvinistic line from our main corporate baddie in Echo 14, the series finally gelled. To this point, I’d been somewhat reluctant to embrace Echo as a worthy follow up to SIP. Don’t get me wrong, Echo is a gorgeously told story featuring interesting, complex characters dealing with interesting, complex situations–basically everything one looks for in a monthly comic (though, admittedly, Echo reads better in trades–but that’s a horse of a different discussion). Overall, it’s been the rare issue that didn’t deserve a double 5 rating. That said, I couldn’t escape the suspicion that this was Moore’s commercial follow up to the strikingly non-commercial brilliance of SIP. Echo is a great adventure story in the same way that SIP was a great love story. SIP, however, seemed to transcend the love story genre through its ambition to explore every odd angle of every odd character and its insistence to sloppily wander away from the narrative in surprising, fascinating ways that somehow reinforced the books central theme that life, like this comic (and this sentence), is indeed messy–deal with it and find what you love. In contrast, from the beginning Echo has been as tightly written as it is drawn; it’s a straight sci-fi action adventure story about a woman being endowed with magical armor and the villains who try to get that armor away from her. Instead of transcending its genre, Echo embraces it with beautifully rendered arms. But now with issue 14, that’s starting to change. Moore’s obsessions with the themes of masculine control pitted against feminine chaos are starting to dribble through the cracks in his well built narrative, and that is a wonderful thing. The reveal here of the cave-man dipped sexism of the bad guys who declare “the world is more complicate than that” while not allowing for the actual complications that have arisen from their experiments (their solution–kill it!), elevates the series from a fun adventure story to an exploration of gender response to the new and extraordinary. Just look at the cover: a man killing the armor while a penis launches out of him contrasted against the a woman majestically looking out to the distance with the armor wrapped around her breasts–both set against the background of a nuclear explosion outlining the stakes. I don’t necessarily agree with Moore’s opinions on gender issues, but the tensions and diversions that arise from his expressing these opinions are what I enjoyed most about SIP, and I’m grateful to see them finally poke through in Echo, finally mussing up all that lovingly drawn hair. There are thousands of well told sci-fi stories out there; but there is only Terry Moore, and his sci-fi story should be, and now likely will be, unique.