Ace Magazines was founded by the husband/wife team of A.A. Wyn and Rose Wyn in 1940 which ran until 1956 with a wide variety of superheroes, some of which got their own titles. One of their comics highlighted four heroes in a single issue but in separate stories titled Four Favorites featuring characters like Raven and Vulcan, along with room for at least one other adventure story starring good guys like Black Ace, Mr. Whiskers, and Blitz Buster. The regular spotlight supers shown on most covers were Lash Lightning, Captain Courageous, Magno, and the Unknown Soldier. Even though it was called Four Favorites, the cover would usually include Magno's sidekick Davey and Lash's partner Lightning Girl. One particular supervillain shown on the cover of Issue #5 menaced all four of the main heroes all as he simultaneously captured each of them in their own little individual death-trap. Whoever this guy was, he made Jigsaw look like a freaking amateur. Magno is going to have the door slammed on him in an iron maiden, Lash is in a modest sized transparent gas chamber, Capt. Courageous is dangling by a string ready to be dropped into a roaring lava pit, and the Unknown Soldier is about to have a cannon ball shot point blank strait up where the sun doesn't shine! This pointy-eared devilish offender appears to be at least 8 ft. tall unless he's standing on a stool, plus sporting your typical bad guy swirly beard and mustache while wearing a military overlord getup decorated with red skull emblems. You can tell this guy is the malefactor of this story just by his appearance alone, plus his huge hulking shirtless minions also look like they crawled right out of Hell itself. This picture alone makes him look like he's the most successful supervillain of the entire Golden Age by offing a quartet of high-ranking super guys in a single setting like for him it was just Tuesday. However, this wrongdoer is merely clickbait as he and his goons don't appear in the comic at all, and you never see any of these heroes in the same room at the same time. In their own stories, each of the heroes is locking horns with either Axis powers, supervillains, or a ravenous werewolf, so the entire comic is totally void of this creative criminal mastermind. The fiend has been referred by comic historians as "Red Death", but whatever his victorious backstory was and how he ended up catching this many headline heroes in multiple executions is left completely ambiguous. Hopefully some creative writer will fill in the blanks that this overachieving miscreant never got around to informing his fellow knaves of. Something to brag about at the next supervillain hoedown.
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