One of the best things about "Good Old Days," from the perspective of this comics fan, was their reprinting of old-time comic strips. When I started buying the magazine in 1985, "Good Old Days" would devote around 3 pages per issue to reprinting an old strip, usually with one strip taking up the whole page.
For example, the January 1985 issue (whose cover I showed on the previous page) contained a 1959 "Good Old Days" panel by Erwin L. Hess, which took up half a page, a full page "Freddie the Sheik" strip from 1923, a 1923 "Just Boy" page, and a 1922 "Katzenjammer Kids" page.
The back of the magazine also advertised four "Old-Time Comics" volumes reprinting old comic strips. Each issue was 10" x 15" in size and 64 pages, for $2.00 each postpaid.
"Good Old Days" almost always printed the comics (like the rest of the mag) in B&W. But the December 1985 issue had a few pages in full color, which certainly made the old comics more appealing to look at. The color pages consisted of two new full page illustrations by artist Dwight Boyce, two half-page panels by Boyce (partially colored), a "Bringing Up Father" page from 1920, an "Ella Cinders" page from 1930, a 1930 page of "The Gumps," and an ad for women's hats from 1925.
The "Ella Cinders" and "Bringing Up Father" pages can be seen below. Click the pics to view them at a much larger, readable size. Cool, huh? Incidentally, this was the first I'd ever heard of "Ella Cinders" and I've been wanting to read more of the strip ever since.
An ad that appears at the end of the Dec. 1985 issue is for the "1985 Christmas Annual," which notes that it "WILL NOT be sold on the newsstands. YOU MUST order direct by mail in order to obtain your copy. There is no other way for you to get your copies." No doubt this issue would be hard to find today.
By the late 1980s, "Good Old Days" cut back on the amount of old-time comic strips that would be reprinted in their pages. By the 1990s, comic strip reprints had been dropped almost entirely, although old-time comic strip content would occasionally find its way into their pages. For example, the following 3-page article, profiling the career of classic cartoonist Roy Crane, was printed in the May 1997 issue of "Good Old Days Specials."
Page 3 of this article is devoted to the art of "Good Old Days" illustrators like Sid Couchey.