Echo
Gender: Transgender Woman
Publisher: DC
Character Type: Primary
Alignment: Neutral
AKA: The Corinthian, Dread of the Endless, Lady Phantasus
Summary: Originally introduced into the Sandman universe as a rampaging serial killer who happens to be a transgender woman, Echo is relentlessly pursued by The Corinthian as punishment for her crimes. She escapes to the world of the Dreaming where she is reborn as a woman. Told by Dream that she must become the third Corinthian, she is sent back into the 'waking world' on a journey of discovery. Echo is not the first transgender primary character in the Sandman universe; that honor goes to the legendary Wanda in the arc titled "Game of You." However, Echo is the first transgender character in Sandman who was created by a trans woman (Caitlín Rebekah Kiernan).
Database Links: DC Wiki
Unlike Rachel Pollack’s Coagula and Maddie Blaustein’s Marisa Rahm, Echo isn’t trans in the same way. It’s through a sort of magic that Echo goes from being a male transvestite to becoming a woman in The Dreaming. That’s not to diminish the importance of Caitlin R. Kiernan’s contributions to comics or to imply that it makes Echo’s stories inherently less important than Coagula’s or Marisa Rahm’s, but Echo’s story and her journey as a character is certainly different, and it’s a story that does fit well into The Dreaming. (Read more)
Joe Corallo, "Caitlin R. Kiernan and the rising stars," Comic Mix, September 20, 2015.
Echo, whose figuration emerged from Kiernan’s use of words to shape and direct images produced by others, offers a unique opportunity to see “transitioning” not as something linear and final, but as something that happens in a multiplicity of ways, over and over again, differently every time, from each script to each penciled page, and in the gutter between each panel. (Read more)
Sean Moreland, "Corinthian Echoes: Gaiman, Kiernan, and The Dreaming as Sadomodernist Gothic Memoir," Humanities, 9(9), April 2020.