As his underlings buried Gotham beneath a crime spree, Black Mask himself began his vendetta against those who he believed had wronged him. He murdered three Wayne Foundation executives, using masks that had been laced with a concentrated form of Janus Cosmetics' toxic makeup. With that done, he then kidnapped Circe from her new career as a magazine model and forced her to don a mask laced with a diluted form of the makeup, sparing her life but permanently disfiguring her face.