Dr. Thomas Ellison

Latest revision as of 19:20, 28 March 2008

Dr. Thomas Ellison

An American scientist and astronomer, once a close friend and neighbor of Bruce Wayne's father, Dr. Thomas Wayne, who according to World’s Finest Comics No. 146, studied the planet Krypton for years prior to its destruction by means of a revolutionary “monitor-type telescope” of his own invention, an optical device of such “unprecedented power” that it enabled him to observe events on the far-off planet as though they were happening merely a few feet away.

As time passed, Ellison studied Krypton’s culture, mastered its language, and began to while away the hours at home by showing the infant Bruce Wayne, with whom he often baby-sat, photographs of Krypton and initiating him into the wonders of Kryptonian lore. When Ellison learned that Krypton faced imminent extinction due to an atomic reaction building up within the core of the planet, he beamed an “atomic-neutralizing ray” of his own invention at the distant world in hopes of neutralizing the atomic reaction and thereby averting the cataclysm, but when Krypton exploded anyway, in spite of his efforts, Ellison was beset by unbearable guilt, believing, erroneously, that his ray had somehow been responsible for stimulating Krypton’s atomic disturbance “to the critical point,” thereby causing the death of the planet.

In December 1964, however, when Superman uses a special “time-space viewer” from his Fortress of Solitude, a device which “picks up light and sound waves from the past” and thus enables one to view selected historical events, to re-create the end of Krypton, Ellison learns that his valiant effort to save Krypton merely came too late, and that he played no part whatever in bringing about the planet’s destruction (“Batman, Son of Krypton!” pts. I-II—no title; “The Destroyer of Krypton!”) (TGSB).