i see that most of the posters on this thread are a lot younger than I, and as expected most are more Superhero and action-type comics fans. So, it's nice to see that there are a few Carl Barks fans here, too!
I had my first exposure to Golden Age comic books DURING The Golden Age(late 1940s), as it happens, having Carl Barks stories read to me by my parents and grandparents years before Uncle Scrooge Comics existed. I was 2 and 3 years old when they read my older cousins' early and mid 1940s comic books to me, and I memorized them and started learning to read by knowing the text by heart, and soon realising that the text letters made the sounds of the words, and near the end of my 3rd year, I was reading. I was to young for me now, to remember which was the first book. But the most memorable were "The Mummy's Ring", "Pirate Gold", "The Firebug", and some Walt Disney's Comics & Stories Donald Duck 10-pagers, and Micky Mouse serialised stories. All four of my male cousins who lived with us bought a variety of comic books, and I got any that I wanted after they had read them several times. I didn't care about the superhero and most of the human-character comics, but I did keep the Disney, Warner Brothers, MGM, Walter Lantz, Animal Comics, and at about age 7, or so, I started collecting "Classics Illustrated", too.
What first caught my eye was the very colourful covers of the funny animal comics, which had large blocks of usually bright colours. I liked Disney cartoons a lot, too. When I was young, we spent summers in The Netherlands (my grandparents' house), and I also collected Disney Comics there. We had Belgian Mickey Magazine from 1949-52, and in 1952 The Dutch Donald Duck Comic started -first as a monthly, soon after, as a Weekly. I moved to The Netherlands in 1972, and, starting in 1984, I've been working for "Donald Duck Weekly" as a storywriter, storyboard and cover sketch artist till today.
I never did expand to reading Superhero, combat, Romance, science fiction, or other "serious Human-character Comics", but I did expand into cartoony Human character comedy comics, and have discovered many Golden Age comics in that genre here on Comic Book Plus, many of which never came to Manitoba, where I grew up, and also many terrifically-drawn funny animal comics drawn by ex-Disney and ex-Warner Bros. and ex-Fleischer/Famous animators for the Sangor Studios, who supplied ACG, Nedor-Standard, and D.C.'s funny animal lines.
Thanks to this website and perusing other Internet websites, and getting scans from comics collector friends, I have scans of most of the US 1940s and 1950s comedy comics (as well as most of the Dutch comedy comics I want) - So, I have a much better idea of the history and development of The US Comic Book industry (especially from the comedy comics perspective). I have many, many thousands of pages of scanned books that I probably could never had afforded to buy, and certainly would never have the room to store (without paying a fortune for public storage space -which I also couldn't afford to store. And the best bonus of all this is that the digital files can't crumble and turn to dust, and reading them won't hurt their condition, - and the scanning puts them all into the same format, and they are all a few clicks away, rather than having to go stand on a ladder and look through shelves to find them.