3. Godzilla King of the Monsters #1-24, Marvel Comics 1977-1979
Adapted from the Toho film monster by Doug Moench and Herb Trimpe (with a little Tom Sutton)

I've always had a soft spot for giant monsters, and this neat little run is my favorite comics kaiju. 
Doug Moench took Toho's giant lizard to the US, and with the help of artist Herb Trimpe, who I've always loved, with a few fill-ins by Tom Sutton on art, took the world's most famous kaiju on a trek from the west coast to the east, delivering a satisfying, complete epic of Godzilla's American adventure. A maxi-series before there were maxi-series, I loved the variety that Moench managed to come up with, especially when Henry Pym shrunk the Big G down to rat-size, where Godzilla was in danger from ordinary vermin, and then growing again to human size before regaining his full majesty in a dramatic showdown with SHIELD and the Champions. I liked that Moench incorporated so many traditional tropes from the Japanese films--the young boy character, the giant robot opponent (Red Ronin, who, being a Marvel creation, continued on after the license was lost)--and that he did a serviceable job of creating new kaiju, although the absence of the likes of Mothra and Ghidorah was definitely felt. 
Perhaps it was a bit childish by the standards of the time, but it was a romp, and I loved it enough to have it very highly ranked among my favorite comics adaptations. 

The Shadow 1-12 (DC Comics) November 1973 - September 1975

Sorry, but I’m again writing about a series that several other posters have already nominated. But, to make a slight distinction, keep in mind that I knew the Shadow less by any reading of the novels than by reading about the character. For me, though, DC’s first Shadow series, thanks largely to the artwork of MW/ Michael Wm. Kaluta, as he was then known, and the scripting by Denny O’Neil, as he was then known, was as fine an adaptation of the spirit of a pulp character as you’re going to see in comics.

(And, somehow, in the sea of homogeneity that was DC’s “trade dress” and cover art in those years, the covers of The Shadow’s brief run managed to be consistently compelling. )

Again, I had not been a Shadow reader; I was more influenced by the snippets of his radio show I had come across and of his legend, as described in books about the pulps, old radio, and heroes of popular culture. (When I finally tried a Shadow novel, sorry to say, it didn’t do it for me.) Still, the trappings of the character were more than enough to lure me in, and everything about the comics seemed to capture the eeriness, the cynicism, the hard-edged naturalism of the Shadow’s world.

If Doc Savage was the pulps’ Superman, The Shadow was their Batman, and O’Neil and Kaluta captured that aspect of him perfectly. The covers, the interiors and the stories were lurid and racy, hinting at decay beneath the surface the way Raymond Chandler did in The Big Sleep. Like Marlowe and Sam Spade, The Shadow himself seemed both apart from but also hopelessly enmeshed in that demi-monde of criminals, crazies and creeps, a leader respected but dreaded by his followers.



Kaluta’s art drew upon Warner Brothers crime movies, Ghastly Ingalls’ horror comics, Eisner's Spirit, and the iconic pulp covers of Graves Gladney and knit them into macabre masterpieces that moved like lightning and dripped with atmospheric detail. 



Inevitably, Kaluta moved on after five superb issues, and his replacements, Frank Robbins (an acquired taste for many, I know) and E.R. Cruz, did a more than creditable job of filling in for him; it helped that O’Neil remained the series' writer. Still, Kaluta brought a distinctive touch of perversity and menace to his stories that Robbins and Cruz just couldn’t. They produced good comic books; Kaluta produced good stories.