10 Worst Mentors In DC Comics

Mentors are the people who teach someone the skills they need to succeed. They are supposed to take care of them, not quite like a parent, but protect them and show their young companions what they need to do to survive, which is especially important in the DC Universe, when the stakes for being a superhero or supervillain are so high. There are countless mentors who show their eventual successors the ropes, from the Dynamic Duo that started it all to the countless teachers inside of the Green Lantern Corps. Still, while there is no shortage of incredible mentors in DC, there are definitely a good portion of mentors who are just plain terrible, either at their job, or for their students. So let’s take a look at ten of DC’s worst mentors, who for one reason or another should not be allowed to teach other people, especially children.

10) Aquaman

The King of Atlantis takes tenth place on our list, but this isn’t to say that he’s a bad mentor in the sense that his sidekicks end up worse than when they joined him. Arthur isn’t a bad mentor, he’s just sort of a nothing mentor. Think about the people who have been Aqualad and Aquagirl, and now imagine Aquaman actually teaching them how to be heroes. He has, and he does, but it is very rare that we actually see him bond with his former or current sidekicks in this regard. Even with his older mentees like Tempest, we almost never see how they interact or care for each other. It can feel like Aquaman lacks any connection beyond professional with his sidekicks, and that’s a darn shame, because he has the potential to stand as a great teacher. He’s not bad, he’s just mid.

9) The Wizard Shazam

Somewhat in the same camp as Aquaman, the Wizard isn’t a bad mentor to Billy Batson, but he only ever does the bare minimum to qualify as such. His position is a bit different to others, as I’m not sure how free he is to act in a direct capacity to influence his chosen Champion of Shazam, but still, Billy is given his powers as a young, usually orphaned child. The Wizard is sometimes the only role model that Billy has in his life, and yet instead of actually teaching him how to handle his new awesome powers, the Wizard will give cryptic knowledge about what he is facing and guide him when absolutely necessary. The Wizard is meant to be this grand guardian with immense knowledge that Billy can turn to in his time of need, but honestly the Wizard is far too willing to cut Billy and his family off the second he thinks Billy is drifting close to acting like Black Adam. We have to cut the Wizard some slack, because after all we don’t know if there are some magical laws that keep him from interfering and he is dead about as much as he is alive, but still, it really feels like he could step up a bit in tutoring the very young and on his own Billy. A lot of this responsibility is being put on the shoulders of a young boy who is basically on his own.

8) Lex Luthor

When you imagine Lex Luthor, you’re likely to imagine him as an egocentric loner who prefers to preside over others instead of teaching them. You’d be right in that assumption, and that’s what made Lex’s few forays into mentoring so abysmal for those he taught. More often than not, Lex is manipulating the person he is teaching to get something out of them, usually some super-powered person who he plans to unleash on Superman. One of the most prominent examples of this is when he seduced the hero Matrix, then Supergirl, and helped her learn to maximize her powers so he could turn her against Superman. Lex is a manipulative monster through and through, and if he ever offers to tutor or teach anyone anything, they should get the heck out of Dodge, because he clearly wants something from them.

7) Green Arrow

Oliver Queen has come a long way in being a mentor over the years, but he has had some fairly bad showings. His most infamous moment is when he discovered that Roy Harper was addicted to heroin, and he decided to kick him out and cut all ties with him. Roy was all but his son, but Oliver cut him out and didn’t think twice about it, casting him aside when Roy needed him most. And that’s far from the only time he’s put his self-righteousness above the wellbeing of his mentees. Mia Dearden, the second Speedy, was constantly at the receiving end of Ollie’s pretty judgemental nature, much like Roy, but despite this he showed he made plenty of strides in being a better mentor. Still, he kicked Roy out and never looked back, so this definitely earns him this spot on the list.

6) Lady Shiva

Lady Shiva is very, very good at her job in the sense that she will ensure that the people she trains will be unstoppable killing machines. She’s trained Cassandra Cain, Tim Drake, and even Batman himself when he needed to recover his position from Jean-Paul Valley. Unfortunately, Shiva never does anything without an ulterior motive. She trained Tim to trick him into helping her on a mission, she trained Cass under the explicit deal that her and her daughter would fight to the death after one year, and to finish Bruce’s training she framed him for murder and sent four of the world’s deadliest assassins after him to try and force Bruce to kill someone as payment. Shiva is a phenomenal teacher, but she will always demand a price from the people she teaches, and more often than not it’s death in some capacity. 

5) Daniel Captio

Dr. Daniel Captio first appeared in Chip Zdarsky’s Batman: The Knight, and was later a major driving force behind the villains in his run on Batman. Capito was a psychologist who trained Bruce, and later the Joker, to harness the full potential of their minds by creating backup personalities inside of themselves. His training allowed Bruce to create the Zur-En-Arrh persona that caused so much havoc, and is what let the Joker create his many alternate personas. Of course, not only is this insane work reason enough to land him on this list, but he is ridiculously petty. After Bruce beat him in a fight, he dedicated everything to ruining Batman’s future. He not only helped the Joker become the monster he is today, but also specifically designed the circumstances to unleash Zur-En-Arrh versus the Joker to truly see a battle of order versus chaos that would destroy everything Batman stood for and ruin Gotham City. He unleashed two horrible monsters on the world and nearly tore down an entire city because Bruce embarrassed him, and of course the things he teaches people is absolutely insane and feels like it’s an active detriment to everybody.

4) Joker

The Joker has actually taken the time to raise up several sidekicks, but even then he specifically makes sure to ruin the lives of whoever he works with. Harley Quinn is of course the most famous example, being a brilliant doctor who was seduced by Joker and transformed into a psychopath to match his own. Naturally, Joker never really cared about Harley, only using her to boost his own ego and get work done, and because he enjoyed tormenting people. Joker routinely abused Harley physically and psychologically, but she actually wasn’t his only sidekick. He took the nihilistic woman Punchline under his wing to teach her how to not care about anything, and he even once trained a strangely smart gorilla named Jackanapes to do crime really effectively. Joker always makes everyone around him worse, and he will do anything to make sure the people who look up to him have terrible, awful lives for the crime of being near him.

3) Blue Devil

Blue Devil is a small-time hero who was originally a wannabe movie star. With no prospects, when the demon Neron appeared and offered him fame in exchange for destroying an unmanned power plant, Blue Devil couldn’t help but accept. Unfortunately, this inadvertently resulted in the death of Marla Bloom, his close friend and the beloved aunt of his sidekick, Kid Devil. Of course, he kept this secret hidden from Kid Devil and after the young man tried to break into the movie business himself, cut all ties with him. Later, Kid Devil made his own deal with Neron, where he would get superpowers and lose his soul, but he could keep it if he still had faith in Blue Devil by the time he turned twenty. Kid Devil thought this was a done deal, until Neron told him what his mentor did and hid. When Kid Devil confronted him, Blue Devil admitted to lying about everything and hiding the truth for years, leading to Kid Devil cutting all ties with him. Any mentor who makes a deal with the literal devil is a bad mentor, especially if said deal kills their mentee’s aunt and they refuse to say anything. 

2) David Cain

David Cain is probably one of DC’s worst fathers of all time, and is easily one of the worst mentors too. Now, similar to Lady Shiva, Cassandra Cain’s other birth parent is actually really good at teaching people, but maybe he’s a little too good. His only real student was Cass, and he trained her in conditions that go beyond inhumane. He never talked to her, only communicating with body language and combat, to the point where her brain developed to read movement like speech. He would randomly attack her without warning, like the time he walked up to a five year old Cass and shot her from behind, just to keep her on her toes. The fact that David Cain could force this kind of cruel, monstrous training onto a child, let alone his own daughter, is despicable enough to earn him second place on this list. He literally had an eight year old assassinate someone for Christ’s sake.

1) Granny Goodness

If you look up “terrible mentor” in the dictionary you won’t see Granny Goodness’s name, but that’s only because “terrible mentor” isn’t in the dictionary. She is the pinnacle of terrible mentorship, the worst of the worst in every universe. She is one of Darkseid’s greatest generals, and is in charge of training his armies, specifically the Female Furies. She abducts children into her Orphanage to pit them against each other and train them to be killing machines that exist only to serve Darkseid, destroying any sense of hope or individuality. She is an immortal monster who literally serves the God of Evil, and not only does she worship the very ground he walks upon, but she grooms others to do the same. She kills hoards of children for her horrible experiments, but she pretends to be a loving mother to all of them, and that’s the worst part. She gives them a twisted idea of love that involves throwing their lives away to serve a monster who couldn’t care less about them, so yeah, she’s the worst mentor in DC.

So there are ten of the absolute worst mentors in DC Comics. Of course, there are plenty more that could earn a spot here, but who do you think belongs up here? Do you agree with the list, or think someone else should reign as the worst of the worst? Let us know in the comments below!