Forbidden Worlds #16 (American Comics Group, April 1953) is a six-feature pre-Code horror anthology under a Ken Bald cover, running the genre's most reliable machinery at monthly speed. "The Doll" has an evil doll bring a killer back from the dead. "The Living Head" keeps a disembodied head full of terrible life — a motif ACG had already used to good effect a few issues earlier and clearly liked. "Castle in Cornwall", "Lure of the Snake Goddess" and "Mountain of Doom" fill out the middle. The issue closes with "True Werewolves of History: The Rajah of Balaralphur", drawn by Edvard Moritz: an Indian village comes to its rajah about a wolf that is killing them, and he tells them to solve their own wolf problem. When a villager's thrown rock leaves a wound on the wolf's head, the rajah appears the next day with the same wound in the same place; when the animal is finally caught in a trap and has to turn human to get free, the villagers take him at his word and deal with their own wolf problem, with clubs. The whole book is 32 pages, full colour, ten cents, edited by Richard E. Hughes.

Forbidden Worlds launched in July/August 1951 as a dime comic subtitled "Exploring the Supernatural!", the companion to ACG's Adventures into the Unknown — the medium's first ongoing horror title. ACG was a small, resolutely independent New York publisher founded by Benjamin W. Sangor and co-owned by Fred Iger; the corporate name on the paperwork was Preferred Publications, Inc. of Buffalo. Its horror line kept a house style distinct from the competition: atmospheric, often wry, and far lighter on gore and sexual content than the EC and Harvey books of the same year — one reason both ACG horror titles survived the 1954 Senate subcommittee hearings and the Comics Code without wholesale reinvention. By spring 1953 the formula was fixed: 32 pages, six features, a Bald cover, and one recurring pseudo-documentary slot — "True Vampires of History", "Ghostly Avengers of History", and here "True Werewolves of History" — that let the book claim educational value while delivering the same monster.

Read today, issue #16 is a good specimen of that "True … of History" franchise, which ran across ACG's horror line and is one of the more revealing artefacts of the pre-Code era: publishers had already worked out that framing horror as documented fact was both a selling point and a defence. "The Rajah of Balaralphur" also carries the period's colonial baggage plainly on its surface — an Indian aristocrat as the monster, the villagers as an undifferentiated mob — which makes it useful teaching material as well as a brisk werewolf story. Because the 1953 material is generally treated as public domain in the United States, the original issue remains freely readable through Comic Book Plus and the Digital Comic Museum.