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| Nathan Ellery | |
| Aliases: | Mister E. |
| Continuity: | DC Universe |
| Notability: | Antagonist |
| Type: | Criminal |
| Gender: | Male |
| Race: | Human |
| Location: | Louisiana |
| Status: | Alive |
| First: | Swamp Thing, Vol. 1 #1 |
Nathan Ellery is a fictional criminal featured in comic books published by DC Comics. He is considered part of DC's Pre-Crisis Earth-One continuity, though his existence and background have been preserved in the rebooted internal reality which existed following the 1985-86 maxi-series Crisis on Infinite Earths. The character first appeared in Swamp Thing, Volume 1 #1 in November, 1972.
Biography[]
Nathan Ellery is a mysterious man who is known by his associates as Mister E. What is known is that he was a corrupt businessman with vast corporate interests and head of a subversive cartel known as The Conclave. Back in the 1970s, Mister E. learned about the top secret location of a government scientific research project headed up by the husband and wife team of Doctors Alec and Linda Holland. The Hollands were developing a bio-restorative formula that would promote vegetative growth in otherwise inhospitable environments. Should production of this program have continued, it would have greatly threatened Mister E.'s business interests. Mister E. sent his underlings Maxwell Ferrett and Bruno to the Hollands' Louisiana laboratory armed with a blank check, offering to buy their formula so that they could prevent it from reaching the open market. Alec and Linda immediately refused, and Ferrett made a veiled threat about how it would be in their best interests to sell it to them.
Though he had hoped to find a peaceful resolution to his problem, he was not above making use of more aggressive measures to get his way. He first had one of his cronies, Louisiana Blue, outfit a radio transmitter on a mutt that he then had infiltrate the Hollands' lab. He then sent Ferrett and Bruno back to the lab to try and muscle the Hollands a second time. This time however, he instructed his men to execute a more permanent solution to the problem should the scientists prove to be uncooperative a second time. They knocked Alec Holland unconscious then strapped a bomb underneath the laboratory work station to destroy the formula. When the bomb exploded, it doused Holland with chemicals and he ran off aflame into the nearby swamps. The chemical bath interacted with the swamp water and local vegetation and what was once Alec Holland was now a hulking mass of plant matter known as the Swamp Thing. [1]
Alec Holland killed Maxwell Ferrett and Bruno. When word of this got back to Mister E., he was enraged over losing two of his best men and blamed the incident on the Swamp Thing. [2]
Mister E. continued to monitor the Swamp Thing's activities through the dog, which now accompanied Matthew Cable to a Balkan village in Southeast Europe. He prided himself on the fact that Cable was completely unaware of the Conclave's activities. [3]
Notes & Trivia[]
- The character of Nathan Ellery was created by writer Len Wein and artist Bernie Wrightson.
- This version of Mister E. is not to be confused with the mystic time traveler known as Mister E, who is also a DC Comics character.
- Mister E. had a pet monkey.