I'd say the design works pretty well at its core level, but there's some aspects of overcomplication that might make things hard to animate or remain clear during animation. Notably the texture on the mask.
I'd say another thing of note is the feet, a better approach to this one may be to simply rework everything from the knees down on the first sprite rather than try to go for the second.
The FIRST one, I feel, has a stronger cartoony aspect to it. The heavy emphasis on geometric shapes gives it a nice almost cartoony look and paints the character in question as strong but slow. The mask dehumanizes them a bit making them slightly malicious looking, and the hunched posture either reinforces that or sells them as a sort of "defeated" person personalityways.
Try playing with that geometric angle, there's a lot of potential there and I do like the flow going here.
Final note: try moving the legs back about two or three pixels on the side-view sprites, it may not be as anatomically correct but it might emphasize that line of action a bit.
