Nick Cardy's Caveman Killers Cover On Jungle Comics #16, At Auction

Nick Cardy is remembered as one of DC Comics' great cover artists, but his cover for Jungle Comics #16 comes from the very beginning of his career. Using his family name, Viscardi, the 20-year-old artist put Kaanga in the clutches of a mammoth while other men battle a T. rex in the background, and his companion Ann Mason cowers helplessly nearby. The cover calls the story "Caveman Killers," and the cover spectacle represents the interior saga by Frank Riddell and John Celardo very well. The lost world awaits inside.

The ten-page Kaanga story inside, scripted by Riddell and drawn by Celardo, divides its lost valley between a group called the Hut Men and another, the "Cave Men Killers" of the title, the Soths. Kaanga and Ann have to fight through a prehistoric gauntlet here, including a giant spider, an enormous amphibian, dinosaurs, and a mammoth. Of course, the basic concept was made famous by Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, but another comparison is closer in time and detail. Hal Roach's One Million B.C. opened April 5, 1940, and is even closer in theme and details to "Cave Men Killers."

Nick Cardy had entered comics through the Eisner-Iger shop around 1939 and found an early home with Fiction House. His work on Jungle Comics, Fight Comics, and other titles came decades before his highly-regarded runs DC runs on Aquaman, Teen Titans, and a long sequence of memorable 1970s covers. The rest of the issue also meets Fiction House's usual high standards. Henry C. Kiefer's Wambi assignment is a good example from an artist who had been in the comic book business for five years by the time he worked on this issue. The issue includes Saul Rosen's Red Panther, Al Walker's Simba, Bill Bossert's Terry Thunder, and a tentative credit for Robert Pious on Fantomah.

This is another tough one. The CGC lists 14 copies across all labels, including 11 Universal copies. Two Universal copies are at CGC 7.0, and four are graded higher. Heritage calls this the highest-graded copy it has seen in ten years and only the sixth certified copy it has encountered. Unsurprisingly, the higher graded copies rarely come up. Jungle Comics #16 pairs a fantastic Nick Cardy cover with an interior lost-world-style story to match. A compelling combination of rarity, cover, and contents, there's a Jungle Comics #16 (Fiction House, 1941) CGC FN/VF 7.0 Off-white pages up for auction at the 2026 August 13 Golden Age Century Comics Showcase Auction V #40377.