Lousy Leaders

There are those guys who can lead their team through anything and bring them out alive and winning. But for every Captain America out there, there are those leaders who have no reason to be in charge of anything but always are. Here are a number of leaders we don't think we'd ever follow:

Cyclops

The on-again, off-again leader of the X-Men has never done anything noteworthy in his years of service. And yet, somehow, he always seems to end up the leader of whatever X-team he's on.

Jean Grey has died how many times under his watch? How about Thunderbird, Banshee, Colossus, and Kitty Pryde over the years. Yet when it's time to pass the leadership mantle, folks are scrambling to follow this guy.

Only Wolverine has ever really given him grief over his leadership (though Storm took control of the group for a brief time). It's sad to think the beserker rage guy has more sense than most of the other mutants in the Marvel U. Thankfully, they killed him off in the final X-Men movie (albeit offscreen). I think it's about the nicest thing anyone says about that movie, for some reason.

Jack (from Lost)

Holy cow! If you want to make the right decision on this island, then just find out what Jack wants to do and then do the exact opposite. While he might have started out strong, every single decision he's made in recent years has done nothing but gone wrong.

Trust Naomi and the freighter folk? Trust Ben Linus, then distrust him, then trust him, then don't? The list goes on and on. It's safe to say that if the story were real, it would be incredibly easy to figure out who should be left to go fishing with Jin while everyone else figured out what to do.

By the way, I realize Lost isn't a comic book, but comic fans everywhere seem to appreciate the intricate time-traveling storyline.

The Red Skull

Give me one scheme this guy has tried to pull off that's actually worked over the years! Decades of trying to kill Captain America and yes, he finally pulls that off...but then he doesn't because Steve Rogers is back again.

Can you imagine how it must be for him to recruit people? "Yes, we are hiring and I know our record isn't that good...but this time I promise you we are going to take down that wretched super hero! Captain America? No, I'm afraid I've given up on that one. Now we're specifically targeting Captain Carrot and his Zoo Crew! They will pay, American swine!"

Nighthawk

Look, I love this character and think he's got a really cool costume, but let's be honest about his record with the Defenders. He was leader for 70+ issues, and in that time he alone was kidnapped and held hostage by some supervillain or another over a dozen times!

That is no exaggeration. At one point, he even had his brain swapped out for five issues where he showed up in the book, but was really a bad guy leading the team. And while "Defender for a Day" was an incredibly cool storyline, the mere fact that dozens of heroes (and a few villains) could show up and call themselves Defenders without the leader's consent shows a definite lack of leadership potential. You think a few heroes would have shown up at Avengers Mansion and called themselves Avengers while Captain America was in charge? Nope.