Honestly before even reading comics I knew about the ages of comic book history (Golden, Silver, Bronze, Dark, Modern, etc). I knew that the Golden Age was when comic books were main steam and you could basically get away with whatever you wanted until moral guardians got spooked and Archie Comics started to put restrictions on what everyone could do (while letting themselves side).
This really created this narrative where the Golden Age before the media scare was this wild west era where creativity reigned while the Silver Age that came after it was this silly time where the only accepted stories were silly Super Friends esque stories.
Then you actually read it and realized that the Silver Age, while a bit campy at times, mostly saw writers and artist greatly experimented with their medium.
The Golden Age on the other hand was just kind of awful. Don't get me wrong I do appreciate the great characters born there like Captain America and Namor, the legacy characters like Electro and Vision and even some of the less popular heroes like the Challenger and Angel, but their story telling had a lot of room to grow before it became worthwhile and some of their other creations at the time were really forgettable.
Take for example: The Phantom Bullet.
The Phantom Bullet is a superhero equipped with an ice gun.
Now think about how that would be cool and than immediately throw that idea away because they didn't write him like that.
The Phatom Bullet's ice gun doesn't freeze people like Mr Freeze or shoot icicles like Mei. His gun shoots a normal ass bullet that just so happens to be made from ice. The gimmick is that the bullet melts away leaving no evidence of it behind.
Now the reason I'm bringing up the Phantom Bullet is that he starred in what I think might be just the worse comic story I have ever read. (Daring Comics #2, 1940)
So there is a series of attacks where men are being killed in high up buildings with locked doors and open windows.
From the evidence the Phantom Bullet suspects that bird men are murdering random men.
All the attacks happened high up, there were feathers everywhere and the crime scene had hand prints with 7 fingers.
So they build up this mystery. Really string you along with the possibility of bird men.
I'm just going to cut through the fog of mysticism here with a recently sharpened machete.
The answer was racism all along.
And then he murders them all by tricking them to jump out a window. Like leave it to the 40s to add insult to injury. They didn't even have this asshole kill them with his one gimmick.
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