(Sure-Fire Comics 001, 1940)
The Green Mask is after one thing: world domination, and he's looking to achieve it by capturing the Shock Ray, a weapon capable of paralyzing hundreds of people at a time, and which has been deemed too terrible to use by the US government (just why this is it unclear - my only idea is that it is either a fatal paralysis or a permanent one).
The thing about the Green Mask that is very compelling is his hood - I'm always harping on about those characters who make the choice to have a nose cutout in their evil villain hood, and how that choice is a perfect one if you want comfort and also don't mind looking bad, and while the Green Mask has chosen to have ear cutouts - very similar - he has also gone with nostril holes instead of the full nose, and I have to say that that strikes me as both bad-looking and immensely impractical/uncomfortable. His minions all look terrific in their Halloween demon masks, though.
Another thing I'm always yapping on about is the long stretches of pointless action in the middles of Golden Age stories, and in no story is that more evident than this one. The Green Mask gets ahold of the Shock Ray plans on the first panel of the second page, and the much of the rest of the fifteen-page story involves his attempts to kill or capture various people tangentially involved in the theft for no stated reason, while X gathers more and more evidence toward his eventual capture.
And speaking of that capture, once it happens the Green Mask is revealed to be... Sam Barkley! And let me tell you that when I first read this story I was a little tired and so I figured that the fact that I had no idea who Sam Barkley was meant that I hadn't been paying enough attention, but no, Sam Barley is a "famous sportsman" who made a one-panel, non-speaking appearance, six pages earlier and that was it. It's the most out-of nowhere reveal in comics history.
Anyway, much beloved ancillary character Sam Barkley turned to a life of crime because he was mixed-race, and his American father abandoned his probably-Malaysian mother (based mostly on the fact that his henchmen are all or mostly Malaysian), leading him to hate all Americans and ultimately embark on a life of costumed crime. If his motivations were more nuanced than that then they will sadly go unexplored, as once captured he immediately chugs some prussic acid rather than be taken alive.
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