The old man who raised a vampire hunter, built his weapons, and kept turning up alive when the story had already buried him.
Abraham Whistler is the man behind Blade: mentor, father figure and weaponsmith, according to the cast list of the first film. Kris Kristofferson plays him in all three, which is a small miracle given what the second film has to undo for him to be there.
In Blade he is the one who explains the rules. He and Blade have been waging a secret war on vampires with weapons built around what they cannot stand, sunlight, silver and garlic, and when Blade brings home a bitten hematologist, Karen Jenson, Whistler is the one who treats her. He is also the one who mixes the serum that keeps Blade’s thirst down, and who knows it is wearing off.
Minor spoiler
Frost’s men attack the hideout, bite Whistler and abduct Karen. Blade comes back to find him turning, and helps him kill himself. That is the end of the first film, and Blade II opens by taking it back: he was turned rather than killed, held prisoner by the vampires for two years, and Blade finds him in Prague and cures him. He spends the rest of that film doing what he does, building UV weapons with Scud, locating the Reaper nest, and quietly releasing a cartridge of Reaper pheromones that gets the vampire who threatened him eaten. When Damaskinos’s forces capture the three of them, Whistler is the one who frees himself and pulls a weakened Blade out.
Blade: Trinity kills him for real, and early. FBI agents locate the hideout and he dies in the raid. Blade surrenders. The daughter he never mentioned, Abigail, is one of the two people who then break Blade out.
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The Marvel Database records that the second film has people calling him “Poppy” and “W”.