I've read about Biro's Daredevil and the early Doctor Fate (I think there was an old Dr. Fate reprint in and early '70s giant I once had... would love to read more of both. I did read a bit of Fawcett's Ibis but not sure who the artist on the ones I read were. I did forget to mention Quality's Kid Eternity which I enjoyed, again in some early '70s DCs... was that Reed Crandall, Mac Raboy? I liked Ibis and Kid Eternity quite a lot from the scant stories I read. Kubert's '40s Hawkmans are okay but I understand he was very young at the time. I do remember one reprinted with The Gentleman Ghost, a great iconic baddie for him!

I feel bad I left out Sheldon Mayer's Scribbly from my earlier list... have loved everything I've read, and especially the 'Red Tomato' sequence that The Smithsonian Book Of Comic Books contained. Have liked The few golden age Justice Societys too, although as with the Flash the art isn't always the best, and maybe made muddier by being reprinted from something less than the original artwork.

The comic strips tended to have higher quality artists as they were paid more, able to sign their work, an audience with a higher likelihood of adults, so they would want to do their very best always. I read that there was some snafu in the early '40s where the syndicate/ERB was looking for someone to replace Burne Hogarth on a Tarzan newspaper strip and saw Reed Crandall's Ka'anga, but Fiction House who they contacted about the Ka'anga artist steered them to someone much lesser who was then doing the feature with Crandall having moved on. Crandall was a lot like Russ Heath which is high praise, he would've done a great Tarzan... I'm thinking he wasn't able to put his name on the Ka'anga comics.

Hopefully you're including Fighting American too!

Yep, always structured in such a way that you would make the most out of the cover space available when put onto comic racks, which weren't always guaranteed to be fully visible.

Ahh...the Not-Cap and Not Quite Bucky! 

It's been a LONG time since I've read any significant amount of GA comics. What I've read recently and has been good and what I know would hold up from earlier reading..

Barks Ducks

Plastic Man

The Spirit

Anything by Walt Kelly

Basil Wolverton's work.

If we consider the GA to go into the mid-50s then most of EC's output.

I'm a far bigger fan of comic strips from the 30s and 40s and into the 50s.

Just going to read Invaders #24 ('70s) which reprints an early Sub-Mariner and Human Torch team-up, should be fun! There's something about knowing it was all new territory back then in a way... although they drew from the newspaper strips like Hawkman was derived somewhat from the hawkmen in Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon and Sheldon Moldoff even drew the feature in that style, and Miss Fury in the newspapers was the first of the various cat type ladies that would spring up in the comic books. Target Comics had some early Basil Wolverton, and Amazing Man had some Bill Everett. There was a '40s Classic Comics/Illustrated of Lorna Doone I had that was full-length Matt Baker. Later he launched a newspaper strip about a Gypsy woman named Flamingo with some of the best art he ever did. Unfortunately sometimes reprints of old comics and strips have been truly terrible copies taken from from old copies then 'fixed' to look less like that and looking even worse on high quality paper with new coloring, so unlike the Smithsonian Books that gave us essentially photographs of the old pages, which was so much better!

I was going to ask if anyone ever reprinted the one Porky Pig Carl Barks was credited with, or the Barney Bears in Our Gang Comics by him, but I see there was this... I might try and find that book!