(Action Comics 023, 1940)
Quetzal's actual motivations are unexplored in his encounter with the Three Aces, but his methods - living in a lost Aztec city and using a fleet of remote controlled planes piloted by zombies to destroy anyone who approaches - are fairly indicative of a villainous turn of mind.
(Action Comics 022, 1940)
Whether the capital-D Demon is actually a lowercase-d demon is never actually resolved, but it's not outside the realm of possibility. He shows up when a friend of Tex Thomson's named Cary James ignores local superstitions to visit an island in the Indian Ocean, where he is quickly captured and murdered by the Demon, who then assumes his appearance and identity via fell majicks.
The Demon's only goal seems to be to murder everyone who knew the original Cary James, but whether there is a further motive to his actions is left unexplained, as one of James' friends happens to have a mystic amulet that is the only thing capable of defeating him. The amulet must be applied directly to the forehead, like so:
Love that bop on the head action. I also love that though this is ostensibly a Tex Thomson adventure, he basically acts in the role of observer, as the locket-thrower Dr Drummond drives much of the action of tracking, trapping and ultimately destroying the Demon. Huzzah for competent non title characters!
(All-Star Comics 002, 1940)
Not terribly fantastic as trophies go - a run-of-the-mill political boss tries to kill a newspaper publisher - but if the Flash wants a filthy old bullet, he can have it.
(Action Comics 022, 1940)
The Mask is your garden-variety master of disguise, con artist subtype: he assumes the identities of others in order to acquire monies from their banks and businesses. He is distinguished from the rest of his ilk in two ways: firstly in that he is our second villain to employ the aid of the Tigress and secondly in that he actually has his face surgically altered to make his impersonations.
His downfall comes when he assumes the identity of Zatara in order to claim some reward money that the magician had turned down, leading to this:
It's sometimes unclear whether Zatara ever reverses this kind of transformation, so I just go by what's said and done on-panel. If he turns a crook to stone and says he's going to come back for them later then he does. Otherwise, there's a petrified wrongdoer in a field somewhere to this day. All this is to say: Zatara never gives any indication that he's going to change the Mask back, so I imagine that he served his sentence for fraud and had to reintegrate to society looking like that.
(Action Comics 021, 1940)
The Master of the Moor is part of the kind of comic story that starts out overly complex - the corrupt sheriff and coroner of a small town in Sussex, England plot to replace local aristocrat Lord Ralway with a double in order to steal his lands - and with the addition of a few comic book elements becomes just completely untenable. To whit:
-the man who they have recruited to be the double, the Master of the Moor himself, seems to be Way Too Into his role, as witnessed in the above panel. If any crime required a cool and measured hand it would be the impersonation of a public figure. Costumes and code names and oh, let's say trained giant condors used to assassinate witnesses are a bit too flashy for such a sneaky task.
-they decide to proceed with the replacement despite the fact that the famed magician and super-hero Zatara is visiting. Now, it's sometimes hard to judge just how famous Zatara is supposed to be in these comics, despite his fairly well-publicized world-saving exploits, but any visitor is surely an undue risk in such an operation, right?
Anyway, they get well and truly magicked up.
(New York World's Fair Comics 002, 1940)
Dr Vreekill had a steel-melting ray and a dream (engage in the surprisingly common crime activity of extorting the attractions of the New York World's Fair as a prelude to world domination) until Batman and Robin stuck their big noses into his business.
(More Fun Comics 049-050, 1939)
Masked spy chief. After his first appearance is foiled by adventurer Biff Bronson he pulls one of the more major pivots in supercrime by opening one of those wax museums that doubles as a murder palace, where he himself is killed in a second encounter with Biff.
(Jackpot Comics 004, 1941) An otherwise-unnamed portraitist, the Artist finds himself down on his luck because he refuses to flatter his cli...
