(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 016, 1941)
Karl Schwab is part of a long tradition of villains who spend years and years meticulously preparing for their big moment, only for it to come crashing down the second that a super-hero, adventurer or plucky kid with a pet monkey gets involved. Usually this involves lurking in an old castle or cemetery lair while tinkering or planning or brewing or growing homunculi but Karl actually managed to get caught already, somewhere around 1931, and while he's been stewing in a federal prison all of his little minions have been carrying on for him.
Karl's actual plan is to take over the US - we don't see a lot of it in action due to interference from the Angel, but Phase I involves electrifying NYC. We can only speculate what the next step would be - establish a foothold from which to invade the rest of the US? Install similar systems in other cities , or activate ones that are already there? There's even a bit of good old crypto-fascism, as Karl does a fair bit of exclaiming in German and talking about his home country being cooler than the US. Whether he's working for the Nazis or not will never be known, as it's still mid-1941 (Marvel is a bit more likely to have explicit Nazi villains than other major publishers of the time, but not on US soil, by and large).
All of this speculation is rendered moot by the big fight that occurs between Karl and the Angel, during which Karl's generator is activated at full power, overloads and explodes. Karl takes a piece of shrapnel to the back, while his minions conveniently all die from the sound of the blast, broadcast over their helmet radios.
(this is one of those things that would galvanize me to another long-term open-ended project if I was just a little bit different of a kind of nerdlinger. If I had any knowledge of cartography etc I'd be figuring out where all the lairs and abandoned castles and sewer bases full of desiccated corpses in rubber suits were. Instead I compile spreadsheets estimating how many desiccated corpses there are. To each their own I guess)
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