We Have Already Seen...
...after an assassination attempt is made on Doc Savage and his team, they discover the now-dead killers were Nazis sent to prevent the adventurers from interfering in "Operation Siegfried", involving a German they had encountered years before...
Note: It had long been established back in the original pulp magazines that Doc met the future members of the Amazing Five while they were all incarcerated during World War I in German POW camp "Loki"...which they escaped from!
But, the details of the matter had never been revealed.
This never-reprinted Annual from 1989 was the first time the actual event had been shown.
Two years later, with the final Bantam Books reprints of the original pulps issued, completing the series, Bantam commissioned Philip Jose Farmer, who had written Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (A 'biography' of the character treating the pulps as historical documentation.) and a series of books about the Wold Newton shared universe which postulated that most fictional characters and stories (everything from Jane Austin to HG Wells) fit together into a single continuity!
Think League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but on steroids!
He had also penned a treatment for a sequel (Doc Savage: Arch-Enemy of Evil) to the 1975 George Pal movie Doc Savage: the Man of Bronze, and scripted several pastiches with a thinly-disguised Doc Savage named Doc Caliban along with an equally-thinly disguised Tarzan, including this obvious tribute to the Bantam reprints with a kool Gray Morrow-doing-James Bama cover...
...which made him an obvious choice to do the official "origin" tale of Doc and his team.
The result is quite different from the Annual by writer Mike W Barr, penciler Gabriel Morrissette, and inker Rick Magyar.
Trivia: AFAIK, Escape from Loki is the only Doc Savage prose novel to not be reprinted in any form!
The Action Continues...at the 1936 Olympics, Tomorrow!
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