Jean, though I never really liked either.

Easily Nightcrawler.

In fact, it could be argued that he was the most well-adjusted, most normal of all of the X-Men.

-----------------------

I would say he was the most resilient.  Peter seems the most normal - "stable nuclear family" trumps "killed my beloved blood brother in self-defense".

But Kurt would make a much better wing man!

Yeah, that's probably a better way of putting it, Kevin. Colossus did come from a more normal, stable background, but Nightcrawler seemed to be able to cope with life's adversities better.

As for Banshee, I will say that I always liked the angle of him being the "over the hill" superhero who struggled to keep up with his younger teammates.

It seems like most superheroes are in the 25-30 age range (even the long-lived ones like Wonder Woman are perpetually youthful). It was kind of neat to see a guy on the back side of 40 trying to hang with the young blood. I don't think that angle was explored nearly enough before Banshee was written out of the team.

I never thought of it that way.  The traumatic thing for ME with Banshee was he was my best friend's favorite X-Man.  I'd be Wolverine, he'd be Banshee; he'd call me shrimp, I'd call him Irish.  Then ka-pow!  Banshee loses his powers saving Japan, three issues into my friend's subscription.  We "knew" the rules of the game enough to know Banshee'd be up and about in no time... shows what we knew!  In the end, he had to console himself that Banshee was enjoying a foine retirement in Moira's arms every night.

But back to your point: exploring Banshee's age could have made for great stories.  He had the whole interpol background, could have even been a potential leader.  But I guess that's what made his loss sting - it was a loss of potential stories.  Thunderbird was gone so quickly it didn't seem to matter.

I always thought Thunderbird had a lot of untapped potential, too.

I know a lot of fans think of him as redundant because Wolverine can pretty much do everything he can, only better. But that's what made him interesting to me - the idea that he was the "second stringer" who never felt like he measured up to his teammates. I think they could've done a lot more with him, too.

• Nightcrawler