When I was a kid, comic books were 'boy' things. My husband is the expert in the family about comics. We'll see an ad for a movie and I hear from him 'Cool! I remember reading that comic when I was a kid. We've got to go see that movie.' He's still a kid at heart.

From my limited experience and expose to comics to movies (and you listed all of the ones I knew off the top of my head) I wracked my brain and came up with these three:

The Bride from Kill Bill (I & II)-Her attempted murder, rapes in the hopsital while she was in a coma, thinking her child was dead...yeah-I can see her wanting a little justice.

Swamp Thing (my first movie based on comic)-Main character (can't remember his name) set up in a lab explosion to be killed and it mutates him and he has to live in the swamp. He fights to protect innocents and the environment. All the while he watches his wife live her life and won't let her see him. Pretty sad movie, if you ask me.

The Shadow-I saw the movie with Alec Baldwin. WWI vet whose alienated from pretty much everything goes to Asia, becomes a drug lord and is kidnapped by monks who teach him to use his darkness and go home to fight evil. I love the old line 'Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men? The Shadow knows!'.

Pretty nifty subject, Evie. Until you mentioned it, I never thought about it, but most comic book characters have some major catastrophy happen to them to make them the hero/villian of a story line. Also, the traumas that made them who they are they try to forget or hide from the world.