Who's the Golden Age Flash?

Who's This? The original speedster.

The facts: The first super speedster (i.e. superhero whose sole power is speed), Jay Garrick - the Flash - was created by Gardner Fox and Harry Lampert in Flash Comics #1 (the only hero whose name was right in the title of proto-DC's anthologies), cover-dated January 1940, and would soon spawn copycats like Johnny Quick, the Whizzer and Quicksilver (Max Mercury). He, himself, was based on the god Mercury and thus, the helmet and winged feet. He proved popular enough to get his own quarterly, then bi-monthly, series, All-Flash Comics (1941-1947) as well as appear in All-Star Comics as a member of the Justice Society of America. Indeed, his last Golden Age appearance was as a member of the JSA in 1949. The Silver Age was heralded by the creation of a new Flash, and Jay would appear in the now-classic Flash #123, which proposed that all those Golden Age comics took place on the parallel world we call Earth-2. He and the JSA would then appear in a number of classic JLA/JSA crossovers through the 60s and 70s, as well as All-Star Squadron in the 80s. After the Crisis on Infinite Earths, Earth-1 and Earth-2 were merged so that the original Flash was always part of history and a clearer precursor to contemporary Flashes. Still alive in the modern day, he not only served on several versions of the JSA, but became an important member of the Flash Family in the 90s (and still to this day).
How you could have heard of him: Not only has he been played by John Wesley Shipp (the original TV Flash) on the WB's Flash TV show and Stargirl (and by Billy Mitchell in Smallville), but a Jay Garrick - The Flash mini-series has just wrapped, in which he dealt with his time-lost daughter, the Boom, coming back into his life.
Example story: Flash Comics #84 (June 1947) "The Changeling!" by Robert Kanigher and Everett E. Hibbard

The original Flash's popularity seems to have happened in spite of some of the most primitive art in the DC canon (mostly by Lampert and E.E. Hibbard), a look that became the house style even for other artists who necessarily had to contribute to the strip when Jay Garrick got his own supplementary book. Which is perhaps why I picked a better-looking post-War story. Wait, "The Changeling!"? Was Beast Boy reading Barry Allen's old hand-me-down comics by way of Wally West? The Earth-2 Changeling is Erik Razar, a man who could turn into animals. His Dr. Manhattanesque origin involves a prison escape gone wrong...

...that's pulled off in the confusion by changing into a variety of animals, like an acrobatic ape, a bullet-proof turtle and a gate-breaking rhino. But this isn't really about him. Where's Jay Garrick in all this? Well, the police are trying to bring Razar back in, and given the strange powers he's exhibited, they call in some scientists. Jay is one of those scientists. He's mulling the police intel over when he sees someone about to be hit by a car. Time slows down...

Get used to those tornadoes. The same way that today the Flashes' powers are presented as electrified speed lines, in the 40s the effects were akin to Red Tornado's powers. It's not so bad in this late era, but you'll see it a couple times. But in the next second, the unlucky pedestrian becomes an elephant. Flash wasn't quick enough, but also, not particularly needed... Except to stop the Changeling!

Jay gets thrown a few blocks to a water tank and the villain gets away. He's not a bad detective though, and tracks Razar to his old partner who swore to get revenge on sending him up the river. More tornado-work ensues, because these comics were convinced that a man spinning in place at superspeed would be invisible.

But let that go. The Flash follows Razar to the waterfront (which I have a hard time reconciling with the American Midwest), where the Changeling turns into a shark to follow his old partner Topper to a sunken steamship safe that's being brought up to the surface by scavengers. The Flash can swim fast too. But he's real unlucky and gets his ankle trapped by a giant clam (NOT Razar).

Tornado power saves the day again. One page left to 1) stop Topper and his men, 2) jump in the water and beat up the Changeling, and 3)...

...kill a man(!). That zoom in on Jay's face... he's haunted, I tell ya. Makin' excuses. Justification City!

And that's what a Golden Age Flash story looked like. Basic stuff, though at the end of the 40s, probably more prone to giving villains their own power sets. No consequences. No continuity. Just a guy with a particular set of skills stopping the crimes of another. And tornadoes. Lots of tornadoes.

Who's Next? The Flash's #1 fan.