First off, let's remember that Marvel doesn't have access to all of their own characters when it comes to movies; Fox have the rights to the X-Men characters, the Fantastic Four and certain related characters, and the Daredevil franchise, while Sony will doubtless do everything it can to keep hold of the hugely-successful Spider-Man license. So where does that leave Marvel? Well, with plenty of other characters, it seems... Here are our suggestions, complete with high concept pitches to sell them to the execs, and split out into genres:

Action
Comedy
Fantasy
Thriller
Trippy SF

You're welcome, Marvel.

The Eternals
The Pitch: "Learn the true history of humanity!"
The Explanation: Forget Neil Gaiman's recent attempt to restart this franchise and go back to Jack Kirby's original, which said that humanity was just one of three races created by giant, godlike robots called the Celestials, who have come back to Earth to judge us. Oh, and those two other races? They're the idealized Eternals and the evil Deviants, and they're at war over humanity's survival. Imagine a story this epic (and, admittedly, dumb) being given to JJ Abrams and prepare for box office success.
Must Read: The Eternals by Jack Kirby volumes 1 and 2.

Star Brand
The Pitch: "Man has discovered the ultimate weapon. Watch out, Pittsburgh."
The Explanation: Marvel's 1980s attempt at "realism", the New Universe, contained one particular classic, the story of a man who gains the universe's ultimate weapon - a brand that gives its owner unlimited power - and, well, loses his mind in the process, accidentally destroying his home town of Pittsburgh and launching the world into a nuclear winter as a result. We want to see what Charlie Kaufman could do with this, to be honest.
Must Read: Star Brand Classic volume 1 starts the story, but things get more interesting - and more weird - in the not-yet-reprinted later issues.

Machine Man
The Pitch: "What does it mean to be human, when you're not?"
The Explanation: Jack Kirby - yes, him again - created this character, an android just trying to make it in a world of fleshy humans, as part of his continuation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, so you could almost say that he's fated to be a movie star. Downplay the character's various attempts to be a superhero and cut to the core of the character: Kirby's lonely, melancholic outsider wondering what the human condition actually is. Add Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers, and let rise, slowly.
Must Read: Currently out of print, you'd be best served by looking for Kirby's short-lived run on the original, 1970s, version of the Machine Man series.

The Winter Soldier
The Pitch: "It's The Manchurian Candidate with cyborgs!"
The Explanation: Ignore the comic version's association with Captain America - He was originally Cap's WWII sidekick Bucky, and took over as Cap after Steve Rogers' assassination a couple of years ago - and focus on the character's origin story: An American soldier, saved from near death by Russians only to be brainwashed and given cyborg implants before being used as an assassin during the Cold War, struggling to break free of his programming. How could that fail? Just get rid of the long hair he had in the comic.
Must Read: Captain America: The Winter Soldier volumes 1 and 2.

SHIELD
The Pitch: "Everything you've ever wanted James Bond movies to be... but better."
The Explanation: It's Marvel's premiere spy agency, made up of grizzled veterans of wars both Cold and World, keeping the world safe with gadgets that would make James Bond jealous: Flying cars? Artificial intelligence decoys? A floating helicopter city headquarters? Even their terrorist nemesis organizations have cool-sounding names: AIM (Advanced Idea Mechanics)! Hydra! You'd have to try to mess this one up. Or, you know, cast David Hasselhoff.
Must Read: Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD by Jim Steranko.

Agents of Atlas
The Pitch: "The A-Team does Mission Impossible on a much larger scale."
The Explanation: A resurrected FBI agent inherits a terrorist organization and decides to use it to save the world from itself. Oh, and his best friends include a talking gorilla, a siren, a robot and a nice Jewish boy for Uranus. Jeff Parker's wonderful series repurposing old characters from Marvel's pre-Fantastic Four days is funny, smart and, while it may not seem like it at first glance, exactly the kind of thing to make a movie out of. Give it to the Coen brothers and see what happens.
Must Read: The collection of the original 2007 Agents of Atlas series. Although you wouldn't go wrong with the current monthly series, either.

Black Knight
The Pitch: "What if Martin Lawrence's Black Knight movie wasn't played for laughs and didn't suck?"
The Explanation: Simplify this Avenger's backstory considerably, and you've got the plot for a movie: The ancestor of a famous soldier during the time of King Arthur ends up, through magical process, back in that era and creating the legend that his ancestor was supposed to have personified. Yes, it's Hiro's plot from the second season of Heroes, but Black Knight did it first. And, let's face it, better.
Must Read: Essential Defenders volume 1 gives you some of the character's time traveling history.

Killraven
The Pitch: "War Of The Worlds by way of Planet of the Apes."
The Explanation: Set in an alternate world so far out that it may as well be Middle-Earth, Killraven is the story of War of The Worlds Round 2: The Martians from HG Wells' original story have come back and enslaved humanity, forcing breeding so that they can eat babies (Subtle, this isn't) and otherwise just using and abusing humanity as they see fit. Only one man - Jonathan Raven, apparently called "Kill" to his friends - can save the human race in what can only be described as Battleground Earth done right.
Must Read: Essential Killraven volume 1.

Hellcat
The Pitch: "Buffy for the The Devil Wears Prada audience."
The Explanation: Patsy Walker had it all - Life as a teen superstar, the perfect boyfriend, and her future ahead of her - but somehow, she ended up as a superhero with unexplained magic powers, a former demon as an ex-husband and at least one post-death experience. If someone in Hollywood can't work out how to turn that into a series of allegories for the modern woman, they should just ask writer Kathryn Immonen, whose recent takes on the character's comic incarnation have been quirky, fun and the kind of thing we want to see more of.
Must-Read: The collection of Immonen's Patsy Walker: Hellcat stories comes out a week on Wednesday. You'll want to buy it.

Prime
The Pitch: "Big with superpowers."
The Explanation: 13 year old Kevin Green can turn into an adult superhero anytime he wants... except that he's still the same boy inside, and his adult body reacts to how he's feeling at the time. Which is great when he's feeling invincible and superhuman, but when he's feeling embarrassed or afraid...? Look out. This Captain Marvel (The one with "Shazam," this time) homage adds a layer of self-consciousness and comedy that's perfect for a family comedy... and one that's apparently been in the works for more than five years. So where is it?
Must-Read: All of Prime's appearances are out of print, but hunt the back issue bins for his early 1990s series.

Ka-Zar
The Pitch: "Tarzan meets The Incredibles."
The Explanation: There's little to recommend Marvel's shameless rip-off of Edgar Rice Burroughs' famous Tarzan, with the one exception of the little-remembered late 1990s series by Kingdom Come and Flash writer Mark Waid that brought the character and his family to New York to escape the dangers of his usual prehistoric jungle world, only for those dangers to follow him (and turn out to be something very out of his league). The mix of action, sitcom (especially Ka-Zar discovering his love of gadgets) and drama marks it out as something that could easily work for a mainstream audience, especially if some CGI dinosaurs made an appearance.
Must-Read: Again, nothing in print, but go looking for the 20 issue Ka-Zar series that launched in 1997.

Death's Head
The Pitch: "The Terminator meets Doctor Who."
The Explanation: Everyone's familiar with the concept of the unstoppable killing machine. In fact, everyone's familiar with the concept of the unstoppable killing machine that can travel through time. But what happens when said unstoppable, time-traveling killing machine happens to be a bounty hunter from the future with a strange personal code of ethics and peculiarly English sensibilities, and he's become stranded in our time? Hint: Michael Bay's explosion-filled wet dreams.
Must Read: Death's Head volumes 1 and 2.

Starjammers
The Pitch: "Pirates Of The Carribean in space!"
The Explanation: If Marvel could manage to get these X-Men characters away from Fox (The leader of the Starjammers is Cyclops' dad in the comics), then just imagine the movie that could be made from following a group of intergalactic smugglers-turned-freedom fighters around for awhile. All the fun of Star Wars with none of the Jedi stuff? Surely this is a no-brainer.
Must Read: Essential X-Men volume 3 has a good chunk of Starjammer action.

Vance Astro/The Guardians Of The Galaxy
The Pitch: "Buck Rogers with super-powers and mild insanity!"
The Explanation: The first man sent on a long-term intergalactic mission, Astro wakes up after ten centuries of suspended animation with telekinetic powers and the discovery that the universe is being enslaved by an alien race. Stealing a space ship and gathering together an intergalactic A-Team, Astro dedicates his life to freeing the human race... Or, at least, changing his name to something less dated. I mean, "Astro"? Really?
Must Read: Guardians of the Galaxy: Earth Shall Overcome.

Captain Marvel
The Pitch: "What if Earth's mightiest hero was actually here as an alien spy?"
The Explanation: Firstly, no, he's not the "Shazam" guy. This Captain Marvel is an alien sent to Earth to spy on humanity who ends up empathizing with us a little too much... and pays the price, when his race declare him a traitor for daring to defend Earth. Interstellar politics and a superstrong flying guy who likes to punch things, this is Superman updated for the cynical age. I'm saying, give it to Paul Greengrass and see what happens.
Must Read: Essential Captain Marvel volume 1.

In terms of SF comics, 2008 feels a bit... lacking, to be honest; there was nothing with the energy of King City or Wonton Soup, and a lot of the best books were final issues, instead of the start of something new (Collections and reprints-wise, it was a great year, however - I'd point you in the direction of Skyscrapers of the Midwest, The Babysitter and Jack Kirby's OMAC, to begin with - but they weren't really created this year...). It might just be a necessary lull; next year has new work from Paul Pope, Bryan Lee O'Malley, Brandon Graham, James Stokoe, et al, after all. But it did make this year seem curiously anemic in retrospect. So here is the pick, perhaps, of a poor bunch:

BEST
All-Star Superman
Quite simply, the best superhero comic of the last few years. Tapping into the awe-filled tone of the 1950s and '60s Superman stories while still seeming contemporary, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's twelve-part reinvigoration of the Man of Steel finished this year with the perfect send-off: Something positive, optimistic and just a little melancholy.

Casanova
Matt Fraction's sci-fi superspy series filled its second run with time-travel, sex and gigantic reality-altering weapons before, in its final issue, folding in on itself with a reveal that, at first, felt like a cheat but ultimately recast everything that had gone before and made you need to re-read it like you need to breath. If only everything was this fearless.

(Fraction almost ended up on this list twice; his Invincible Iron Man series for Marvel was, to my mind, the ideal follow-up to the movie, finally figuring out a way to make the character interesting without making him an asshole.)

Fight Or Run: Shadow Of The Chopper
You can argue amongst yourself whether this silent series of strips is really science fiction or not, but Kevin Huizenga's videogame-inspired shorts that bring two surreal characters face-to-face to see their response works both as an exercise in comic formalism and experimentation, and as a funny, surprising reading experience. Me, I'd probably run.

Final Crisis
Yes, there have been a lot of problems with DC's big 2008 "event" - the seeming inability to hit deadlines and switching of artists midway through the story, to start with - but despite it all, Grant Morrison and company's slow-motion apocalypse has been creepy and hypnotic, all the moreso for the way in which it refuses to play by the rules.

Love & Rockets: New Stories
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis analogs slaughter aliens. Surely I don't need to say anything else.

Patsy Walker: Hellcat
I don't know if it's the lightness of Kathryn Immonen's writing, the pop of David LaFuente's artwork, or just the sass of the book's star, but there's something wonderful and unexpected in this lowkey miniseries from Marvel about a fashion model-turned-superhero fighting magical demons in Alaska. In the middle of the publisher's highly successful year, this hidden gem is easily the best thing they put out.

Project Superpowers
Again with the "unexpected" thing, I didn't expect much from Alex Ross and Jim Kruger's 1940s superhero revival... and certainly not the most strange and unusual superhero series of the year. The US government creating zombie soldiers in the Middle East? Lying ghosts with hidden agendas? An evil corporation of robots manipulating everyone that just so happens to have the same name as the parent company of the publisher? It's all here, my friends. Just don't ask me what it all means.

Teen Titans: Year One
It took animation writer Amy Wolfram and artist Karl Kerschl to finally fulfill the potential of DC's team of sidekicks, by offering a story that stayed on the right side of cartoony, but kept an undercurrent of angst and insecurity to provide characters who actually acted like teenagers, for a change. Add some of the best art to appear in any comic book this year and you have a very underrated winner.

WORST
Astonishing X-Men: Ghost Boxes
A strange one, this. It's not really the quality of the comic strip itself that lands it in "Worst" position - although the comic strip itself was nothing to write home about, pretty much generic "alternate world"isms from Warren Ellis and friends - but the format. Charging $4.99 for 16 pages of comic book would be a bit much for a small indie company with a lot of overhead and little say in the matter... but for Marvel to do it, especially without letting fans or retailers know that that's what they were doing...? Kind of an unnecessarily low blow.

Batman RIP
It started so well, but... well, finished so badly. There's very little way to look back at RIP without getting frustrated at the lack of resolution and all the unfulfilled potential left untouched. It's called Batman RIP people - Couldn't you have done something with that that didn't have a villain who may or may not have been the Devil and the most unconvincing, inconclusive death scene ever? Or, for that matter, had a story that actually ended in its final chapter?

Countdown To Final Crisis
DC's Final Crisis may be flawed but great, but the 52-part prelude series kind of missed out the "but great" part of that idea. As well as missing out the "coherent plots, interesting dialogue and story you feel involved in" bits. And, to make matters worse, it outright contradicted multiple points of the series it was created to lead into. Worst of all, perhaps, was the fact that it took the goodwill that DC had gained from their first weekly series 52 and pissed it away in record fashion. An own goal of almost cosmic proportions.

DC Universe: Last Will & Testament
What do superheroes do when they expect to die the next day? Exactly what you'd expect them to, sadly, according to this uninspired, ponderous comic. While not as much of a disaster as Countdown, Last Will & Testament may have actually been a worse comic by dint of just being... well, not unlike well-illustrated fan-fiction.

Jenna Jameson: Shadow Hunter
From its very conception, you knew that a comic that recreated pornstar Jameson as a comic book demon hunter was a bad idea, but only the comic itself could convince you just how much of a bad idea it actually was. Confusingly written, with overwrought narration and a plot that didn't really go anywhere, this was a celebrity tie-in that made Ed Burns' Dock Walloper look like a good idea.

One More Day
This is, of course, a bit of a cheat; One More Day started in 2007, and the final issue came out in the dying days of that year (December 27th, I believe)... But nonetheless, the full effect of it was what started off this year in comics, and pretty much sabotaged the start of Marvel's (remarkably not-as-bad-as-you-think) Spider-Man relaunch - all because Peter Parker made a deal with the devil just to get a divorce (Note: This may be a somewhat biased take on what actually happened in the story itself). Who would have thought that a boneheaded, out of character move that turned your everyman character into a Satan-handshakin' single man would have been one of the big comic news stories of the year? Oh, that's right - everyone.

Secret Invasion
Yes, it was hugely successful, and yes, it was on-time (unlike Final Crisis). But if there was a point to Secret Invasion beyond "Let's try and sell lots of comics," I must have missed it. With a story that lacked plot - or, for about half the series, anything actually happening - based around a premise that was abandoned almost immediately (What if aliens had invaded without us knowi- Oh, wait, they've started blowing things up and coming to Earth as giant green monsters), this was slick, showy... and entirely hollow.

Ultimates 3
I was no fan of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch's Ultimates, but Jeph Loeb's follow-up was a mind-blowing miscalculation that offered fans of the series almost no continuity with its previous incarnation, garish art outshone only by insanely overblown dialogue and, in a reveal that still boggles the mind, a Black Panther who turns out to be the most white of all superheroes. Pretty much an entire series of WTF that led into Loeb's Ultimatum