Pipe Smoker (fictional): William Walter Wordsworth

William Walter Wordsworth is a fictional character from the novel/manga/anime series Trinity Blood.  This series, which began as a series of graphic novels, has--in my opinion--a somewhat preposterous plot but some great artwork and a very cool anti-hero who does not smoke a pipe and is therefore not a part of this post.

So, trying make a long story somewhat shorter, about 100 years in our future, humans tried to colonize Mars and found two different alien bacilli there.  Some humans injected themselves with one of these bacilli and were changed into the Methusela (as they call themselves), or as we would know them, vampires.  Four test-tube babies were the only ones to survive being injected with the other bacillus, which were actually nanomachines, which turned them into Crusniks.  Crusniks are another kind of vampire which can receive their necessary sustenance only by feeding on the blood of "regular" vampires.

There was a big war between humans and Methusela, followed by a very long cold war.  The story begins about 1,000 years in our future when the cold war is cooling down into a very uneasy peace, occasionally aggravated into flare-ups of violence by radicals on both sides. There are three major powers:  the Methusela, the Vatican (the Roman Catholic Church), and the Kingdom of Albion.

Wordsworth is a priest of the Roman Catholic Church, although the Church of 1,000 years in the future would be almost unrecognizeable to us in the present day.  He was a great intellectual prodigy from the University of Londinium who was framed by another human for an incident which resulted in the death of Wordsworth's fiancée and expelled.  He is currently a professor at the University of Rome, where he is also one of the founding members of the AX, a sort of secret group within the Church who work to quell violent uprisings.  Although a professor (and frequently called simply The Professor), he doesn't like to teach and prefers to do research and is an inventor, although many of his inventions have failed spectacularly, usually by exploding.  He is also very proficient in combat using a sword-cane.

I've included three illustrations of him here from all three adaptations.  The illustrations from the graphic novels are very elaborate, detailed and artistic.  Our first picture shows him sitting at his desk smoking a pipe that appears to be carved from a single knobby burl, stem and all (click to enlarge).

The next picture, from the manga, shows him with what looks like a very similar pipe.

The anime adaptation is quite different.  In contrast to the other two versions, the anime has been greatly simplified with much cleaner lines, probably to make it easier to animate.  The anime version of Wordsworth smokes a pipe that appears to be carved from a single block of some white material such as meerschaum, except for the bit which looks like it's a separate piece.

Wordsworth is almost never seen without his pipe.