Welcome to my new space to store my DC related thoughts and rants! Just to give everyone a heads up now - I'm definitely going to get into some very niche territory here, because I have a particular interest in OLD DC comics. Each chapter will be unrelated to the others, though, so hopefully if one chapter isn't your thing, one of the others is. Hope you have a great time… and keep 'em flying!

So, comics are generally split into the golden, silver, bronze and modern age, although I personally like to also refer to a postmodern age of comics. There are a lot of different ways these ages get broken down, so in this chapter I'll run over some of the main differences and hallmarks of the Golden Age. In the next chapters I'll go over the other ages. Originally they were all going to be posted together… but then just the Golden Age was five pages long, and that was already chopping off another three pages that I split into another chapter… so here we are.

Golden Age

The Golden Age has a nice simple beginning - Action Comics #1, 1938 - the birth of Superman. The Golden Age runs into about the mid 1950s with the creation of the Comics Code Authority, and boy was it a wild ride.

The Golden Age was a time of uninhibited experimentation where superheroes slowly started to take the form in which we know them today, and very little was against the rules. Due to a lack of regulation in comics, you could pretty much print whatever you wanted, which means that a lot of Golden Age comics had some pretty violent and gory content depending on where you looked.

One of my favorite things about the Golden Age is the tonal swings. One moment everything is kid-friendly morality and quipping heroes punching out gangsters… and the next someone is violently murdered or someone will casually say the most sexist thing imaginable. This tends to be very funny to me simply because the heroes will have no idea that what they are saying could even be controversial - it's just so normal that no one blinks about it. Reading those comics sometimes can be like watching someone run into a glass door without knowing it - making a fool of themselves without realizing what they're doing. It's like those old-time parodies today where the joke is that something that looks kid-friendly has something bad in it… except the Golden Age was dead serious and wasn't in on the joke.

There are many hallmarks of the Golden Age, from the heroes themselves to the villains they fight.

Let's start with the heroes. The term 'superhero' hadn't really been invented in the Golden Age, so heroes were referred to as 'mystery men' instead. GA heroes tended to be rather boring and very… samey. There was some variation, to be sure, but many heroes tended to come off as the exact same person wearing different costumes with different gimmicks.

Originally my explanation of the different kinds of GA heroes was going to be a part of this chapter, but then it ran on for three pages so I decided to make it its own chapter. Suffice to say that women, children and comedy characters got to have more personality than your more stereotypical heroic fare.

One easy way to identify which Age a comic is is whether or not heroes will disagree with each other. In the Golden (and Silver) Ages, heroes practically never argue with each other… ever (with the exception of women/children/comedy characters as mentioned before).

Villains are also very different in the Golden Age than in all the ages thereafter. Namely, supervillains just… weren't. While you had your occasional supervillain in the Golden Age (particularly late in the Golden Age), most heroes' time was spent fighting gangsters, mobsters, subversives, fifth columnists, spies and other such unsavory but ordinary humans. This can cause problems in a viewer's reading experience because power scaling… wasn't much of a thing yet.

For example, you might be wondering how The Flash, who can easily break the speed of light and has more tricks up his sleeve than Uncle Sam has war bonds could possibly be challenged by an ordinary gangster. And the answer is… he wasn't. Many GA comics have a serious lack of stakes because the antagonists are always so thoroughly outclassed, and it can be difficult to stay invested for that reason. There is a lot of coincidental tripping on objects and knocking yourself out, which is always a satisfying way to incapacitate your hero. There are also a lot of very fun and creative captures, but most people can only watch their hero effortlessly mop the floors with criminals so many times.

One very interesting question of the Golden Age is how it treated women. And it was actually… not as bad as you might think? Obviously, there was a lot of stuff that aged badly, but the gender equality was actually higher than you might expect, and would take a dive once the Silver Age rolled around.

The team of evil supervillains that opposed the Justice Society (think Justice League but in the 40s) had not just one token woman but two and the Justice Society itself wound up with two female members as well. This is, as you will see, much better than the Justice League did for quite some time. I will, in a future chapter, write more about these female mystery women, so keep an eye open for discussions about Wonder Woman and the Black Canary.

There were also quite a few female antagonists. They didn't tend to get into hand to hand combat very often because then, well, the heroes might have to punch them, but they did other things. You had a lot of women who would poison you to death, stab you, shoot you, infiltrate your operations, play the mastermind and catburgle all over the place. Overall, they were surprisingly common!

There were quite a few problematic sexist elements, largely revolving around stereotypes and lack of agency, but things were better than you might expect.

The power scaling issue mentioned a while back extended to the Justice Society of America itself. The original lineup of the JSA included both the Atom - a regular guy who is good at acrobatics and boxing, and the Spectre - the all-knowing and omnipotent wrath of God who sees into the hearts of men. And they went on the same missions.

This is a good time to talk about how bad the Justice Society of America was at being a team comic. The JSA was the first time a group of heroes from different comics ever got together to form their own consistent superhero team, and the writers… didn't really know how to do it yet.

Every JSA team-up for a good long while would go like so: everyone would meet up at the beginning of the issue and trade some banter. Then the chairman of the JSA (almost always Hawkman) would gather everyone and say something like: "Listen up, men! Nazi spies have hidden precisely as many bombs across America as we have members. Everyone split up and find a bomb!" And then everyone would split up and find a bomb or whatever the MacGuffin was for that issue before meeting at the end to fight the big bad.

Because of this, reading a JSA comic was very much like reading a Flash comic and a Sandman comic and a Hawkman comic and a Johnny Thunder comic back to back to back to back. Not much teaming up happening in these team-ups. The bad news is that this ruins the point of a team-up. The good news is that this makes it very easy to exclusively search for the parts with Johnny Thunder.

Recommendations

If you're looking for some good 40s comics… have I got some picks for you.

If you like traditional heroic adventures, Batman was actually very good in the Golden Age. He can be found in the original Batman run, as well as Detective Comics starting on issue #27. Since he has no powers, Batman does not suffer from the same issues of power scaling as many other mystery men did back then. It is very interesting to watch his early iterations as a character, and Robin is a lot of fun as well. Remember, kid heroes get more personality.

If you want something funny - Johnny Thunder, all the way. Johnny Thunder can be found in Flash Comics (not to be confused with All-Flash Comics) and his early appearances were a riot. Despite being a member of the Justice Society, he was not a real action hero - he was a comedy character. Basically, Johnny Thunder has access to an all-powerful genie who takes all his commands literally… and Johnny Thunder is an idiot. Because he is not meant to be looked up to in the same way that the action heroes are, Johnny is allowed to be less intelligent and to have more character flaws, such as overconfidence and an oversized ego. Because of this, Johnny Thunder is one of my favorite characters from the 1940s. He's an idiot, but he's a lot of fun, and, again - comedy heroes get more personality.

My final recommendation is actually a war comic which is very unusual for me. It's the Boy Commandos, and while absolutely a DC comic it's quite different than the regular superhero fare. The Boy Commandos first appeared in Detective Comics #64 where they became a regular feature and later got their own comic. The Boy Commandos are a 'kid gang' type team of four children in the army under the supervision of traditional staight-man Captain Rip Carter. While Captain Carter is your traditional action hero, the Boy Commandos take full advantage of being children who can have actual characters. They are vibrant, have fun interacting with each other, and the comic touches on surprisingly mature and complex themes. Jack Kirby is the artist behind it, so read for his early work if nothing else.