"The Golden Age Is When You Were 12*"

And for that stuff, sure, you're going to enjoy it a lot more as a kid. Character development? You know next to nothing about people yet. You're to some degree blind to all the things missing from the sf of that time, so all you see is the shiny stuff.

As a general statement about the function of nostalgia, I think -- no matter what age you fill in -- it's countered by the frequency with which people carry around negative things about the past, and the combination of those two phenomena would just be "people make a big deal out of things that have already happened."

eg in music, the sequential teen phases of "bubblegum guilt" (which takes you out of uncritical wonder for "the wheels on the bus go round and round" into yr first playground fad), followed by "playground guilt" (= as you grow up a bit and shed yr first acquirement of schooltime pals for ppl you actually choose by elective affinity, ie catch some form of "indie"), followed of course by "indie guilt" (as you are struck by what a twat you were aged 17-23 and all the fun things you LOST by going indie), followed by [whatever] and [whatever2] and [whatever3]...

clearly mileage varies in all of these, but the effects of underlying social forces are hard to avoid (even if you have tuffly resisted any and all in their bulk form, the contortions you will have put yrself through to be "not-as-the-rest-of-humanity" = a big fuckoff lump of an effect)

(clearly also a lame crap woman-from-venus-men-from-mars rub version of the above cd easily by peddled eg by types like the Big Brother psychologists)

Well, maybe it does - I romanticize Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League, Morrison Doom Patrol, and Giffen/Bierbaums Legion Of Superheroes, and I was reading all of that at the age of 12.

I liked comics a lot as a kid, you know because they were COMICS, but I didn't have the money or the determination to pester my parents to take me out to the comic store every week (it was pretty far away). So I didn't really starting reading comic books until adulthood, and thus my critical faculties are INVULNERABLE.

I like Mark S' idea for a schema for the 'seven ages of pop-culture man'. I would like it even better if it made us all rich.

I don't know, let's say maybe when I was 9 or 10 (75/76ish)

no

The golden age was when we were all reading and making fun of 52 and Final Crisis

I was never making fun of Final Crisis!