I was thinking of Joe ??? from Dogpatch - the little character with the permanent cloud over his head? However, as I recollect, while everything fell apart around him, he himself seemed to walk through the chaos without being affected (kind of a Ronald Reagan effect, maybe?). While there are other people who indeed seem to be lightning rods for all the bad luck around. (hum - didn't someone have a hereditary prince, bred for good luck, who had turned out to have bad luck - so bad that he ended up in a statis capsule through the collapse of the system? Drat, which book was that? Space skimmer? Something like that)