Anyway,  I wonder... Was the black outfit for Spider-Man created as an excuse to have two Spider-Man action figures in the Secret Wars toy line, or was that going to be the plan in the comics regardless of the toy tie-in?

Anyway,  I wonder... Was the black outfit for Spider-Man created as an excuse to have two Spider-Man action figures in the Secret Wars toy line, or was that going to be the plan in the comics regardless of the toy tie-in?

**********

I'm guessing it was for the toy line. The version of Doom from the end when he steals Beyonder's powers also got his own action figure.

SPIDER-MAN--The Origin (Spidey's origin isn't exactly an epic, but his beginnings are a great overall story)

SPIDER-MAN--The Death of Gwen Stacy & the Green Goblin (well, they sort of separated that into two movies--in two movie realities!)

SPIDER-MAN--The Alien Suit Saga/Venom (not my favorite comic--and not my favorite movie!)
DAREDEVIL--The Origin (young Matt's accident and Battlin' Jack's death are sure compelling)

DAREDEVIL--Bullseye & the Death of Elektra (and now we're seeing it again on the Netflix series!)

CAPTAIN AMERICA--The Origin (not exactly an epic, but it made a great movie)

CAPTAIN AMERICA--The Secret Empire (Cap quits) & the Winter Soldier (somehow they combined two storylines--both about government overreach and corruption--separated by 40 years and made it work!)

CAPTAIN AMERICA--Civil War (not my favorite comic, but at least the movie didn't kill Cap off for three years!)

IRON MAN--The Origin (again, a simple comic book origin makes for a good movie retelling)

IRON MAN--The Demon in a Bottle (not the best Iron Man movie) 

AVENGERS--The Origin (not every origin makes for a good movie, but they did a nice version of "Loki Brings the Avengers Together")

AVENGERS--Age of Ultron (not really based on the Age of Ultron comic, they just used the name to tell the first Ultron story & introduce the Vision)

FANTASTIC FOUR--The Silver Surfer & the Coming of Galactus (of course the Galactus part should have saved for a third FF movie)

X-MEN--The Death of Phoenix

X-MEN--Days of Future Past

X-MEN--Apocalypse (though I never read that one and don't know if it really deserved a movie)

WOLVERINE--The Claremont/Miller Wolverine mini-series

Some of these were failures, but not for lack of good source material!  The more they deviated, the worse they got.  It's interesting to note that comic book guys working on a shoestring (sometimes just ONE guy pulling it all together!) are often better storytellers than some filmmakers with a crew of hundreds and 100 million dollar budgets! 

The THOR and HULK movies didn't really stick closely to any published storyline and suffered the worst for it.  (Though THOR 2 did mine the Simonson stuff somewhat, though not well, and both HULK movies seemed more inspired by the TV show than the comics.)

DC movies, on the other hand, seems to ignore the comics for the most part, except the best BATMAN movies take a lot from the O'Neil/Adams, Englehart/Rogers, and Miller/Mazzuchelli sources--and they're the best that DC does.  (The Christopher Reeve SUPERMAN movies did get the spirit of the  Bates/Maggin/Swan stories though.)

There are plenty more Marvel stories I would love to see made into movies (Madbomb, anyone?  The FF meet the Inhumans, "Who Remembers Scorpio?", The Kree/Skrull War, the FF explore the Negative Zone, "Terror in a Tiny Town", Lee/Kirby Thor epics, Starlin's Warlock, and plenty more!), but I can't think of any DC "epic" they could make a movie out of!  (What are they going to do--"Crisis on Infinite Earths"?  "Infinite Crisis"?  "Final Crisis"?)  DC has great characters and standalone stories, but not a lot of great extended storylines.  (They can't even do "The Great Darkness Saga" because it relies so much on comic book lore.)

JB - I think the Death of Gwen in a way broke what worked so well with Spider-Man.  He started having more adult problems and he was suddenly going out with a supermodel - which was a long way from the awkward Peter Parker that we saw from Ditko and Lee.

***

In defense of that storyline, Spider-Man had already tackled adult themes with Harry Osborn's drug addiction; and MJ was a regular girl for almost two decades after these issues, until Michelinie and MacFarlane decided she was a suermodel/TV star.  MJ even disappeared from the Spider-books for the better part of that two decade stretch.

Talk about a 'Game Changer'!!!