[link] Good article
I've started buying random comics from the '40s when I go to comic book conventions. I'm not looking to fill in some collection or find some key character, I'm just looking for cool old comics with weird characters and those awesome gigantic logos from the Golden Age.
The thing that really appeals to me about these old books is that they were created at a time before the rules were figured out yet. As time passed, writers and artists would figure out a formula that they'd follow, but in the early days of comics, these guys were clearly making it up as they went along.
The wonderful thing about comics created by kids is the random acts that go on. Kids aren't necessarily thinking ahead and if they get the urge to wrap up a story on page one, they'll do it, and if they feel like drawing unicorns or robots or space monsters, they simply show up with no warning or foreshadowing.
And that's not a bad thing.
It's true. Reality - the real world - is made up on the fly. Everything you say and do is made up on the spot. Sure, you may have long-term plans and a goal that you're working toward, but you can't say with absolute certainty how things will play out. There is no plot in reality. You know that a person is born and lives for a while and eventually dies, but beyond that all bets are off.
A lot of the fun is gone from most modern comics.
There are rules and expectations and readers have come to expect certain things from their Batman comics and Daredevil comics and you can't just have aliens show up on page four. Readers will throw a hissy fit. There are certain rules for Daredevil stories and Batman stories and those rules say "no aliens" at the top of the page.
Another thing missing from modern comics is all of the bad science.
In the early days, superheroes sprang to the comics pages fully-formed with no hint of an origin in sight.
There's something really fun about these old comics - something charming and innocent and oddly fascinating. And, somehow, they lose something when they're cleaned up and re-colored and collected and reprinted on glossy paper.
Even a few years made a difference. The truly awful comics were run off the racks by more competent ones. By the late '40s, the art was vastly more realistic, the adventures far more down-to-earth and the plots far more formulaic. It was no longer the amateur hour. Comics didn't look and feel and read like outsider art - they were perpetrated by comic book professional that knew what they were doing and who had learned from those who had come before them.
An aside here - some years back I shared a studio with Al Gordon, Pete McDonnell and Chris Marrinan. At one point we were the judges of a cartooning contest sponsored by a local comic book store. The comics these kids created were awesome beyond belief. The great thing about them is that nobody had drummed into their heads what the rules were. They had pages clogged with captions and word balloons and sound effects and allkinds of cool characters. One of the more memorable ones involved a person turning into a giant radioactive monster and opting to "live with it" and watch TV instead of going on a rampage. The end of that story was both refreshing and hilarious, with the hulking monster sitting in an easy chair pressing a remote!
I certainly would not want all comics to be like those random comics that I picked up at the last couple of conventions that I attended, but I wouldn't mind getting some of that feel back again. It's kind of refreshing to not know what to expect on the following page of a comic book.
Last Comics and Thank You 
Jolly
Joy
Mesmerized
Gloomy
