Why I Love Golden Age Steve Trevor
There are from Sensation Comics #1, 1942.
So, this first scan is about why I love Wonder Woman, rather than Steve. When I was eight, I got a collection of 40's WW comics, which I still have today, and this was one of the stories in it. I always loved her playful attitude towards her feats; playing "Bullets and Bracelets" was "fun", not something she faced with grim determination and fear.
This one is in because when I was eight and hadn't yet gotten it through my head that sometimes the grownups who wrote comic books and TV shows like The Land of the Lost just couldn't be bothered to make sense, it really broke my brain. Just as I experienced considerable distress trying to understand what was going on in a particular LotL ep that involved a computer studded with magic gemstones, I also went over this panel hundreds of times, checking my own math. A mile a minute is 60 miles an hour, right? So when he was driving 60 miles an hour, he should've been keeping pace with her, right? If she was going a mile a minute and he was going 80 miles an hour, shouldn't he have passed her?
Yes.
[At that age, I was also wondering: since Speed Racer was constantly getting trapped under water in his car and squealing, "We're going to run out of air!" why didn't he just keep a plant in the Mach 5 to convert the carbon dioxide back into oxygen? The car had everything else, why not a plant?]
Steve has read such alarming news that even though his doctor claims he isn't fully recovered, he has to go fight Nazis.
Notice he's not at all displeased to see that his "beautiful angel" is strong enough to break down doors. He thinks it's neat.
Again, he's totally impressed with her, not resentful of her superior physical abilities at all. And he readily concedes credit where it's due, sometimes even dismissing his own contributions to their adventures. Compare that, for instance, with Larry Lance, who always used to claim credit for the Black Canary's Golden Age exploits.
...You know what? I don't think anybody got tied up in this whole issue. That's gotta be a record for WW.