(Master Comics 012, 1941)
At first I was fairly unimpressed with the Terror - I regarded him as yet another low-ambition super-crook, a guy with the wherewithal to invent a hypnotic ray belt and mount the output in the villain-standard rubberoid mask but with no greater ambition than to murder his uncle and half sister to get his mitts on the family fortune. But... is there another, non-crime way to get rich off of a hypnotic ray projector? I imagine that it would be quite useful in a psychologist's practice but that's a get-somewhat-rich-slowly scheme if I ever heard one. I suppose crime might have been the way to go for a young man in need of money, though speaking as an uncle, avunculicide is never the answer.
Once I looked at the Terror with fresh eyes I realized something else: as the Terror, young Stephen Barish was completely committed to the bit. He decided to kill his family, adopted an over-the-top cackling movie villain persona and kept that shit up until he was unmasked (and even then he tried to knife Zoro the Mystery Man and got sword caned for his trouble). Just look at this behaviour:
Just grinning and laughing and gloating and hopping around like a goblin until he is physically skewered. This is the kind of villain I like, even if he has an anti-uncle bias.
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