Forbidden Worlds #4 (American Comics Group, January/February 1952) is a seven-story pre-Code anthology from the golden era of American horror comics, wrapped in a Ken Bald cover whose snarling lycanthrope bears a distinct family resemblance to Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man. The line-up runs the full supernatural gamut: "A Queen for the Voodoo Chief", "Devil-Doomed Sandman", "The Fiend in Fur" — in which Frank fails to convince the sceptical Miss Hall that she really shouldn't walk in the woods alone — "The Spectral Sleepwalker", "Whirlpool of Death", "The Undying", and the science-fiction closer "The Doom of the Moonlings", where a couple is abducted to the Moon by Selena, its imperious queen. The issue's genuine curiosity is "The Undying", a story credited to Alice Carter and Ken Bainbridge, two members of the L.F.O.F.W. (Loyal Fans of Forbidden Worlds) Club, who wrote themselves into the plot: after failing to land a job at the magazine, the pair run afoul of a deceptively frail old couple who turn out to be energy vampires. Interior art comes from Paul Cooper, George Wilhelms, Charles Sultan and Al Camy, under editor Richard E. Hughes.

Forbidden Worlds launched in July/August 1951 as a 52-page 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, and its horror books cultivated a house style all their own: brisk, slightly tongue-in-cheek, more Universal monster movie than EC-style shock. The early issues were also a magnet for young talent later regarded as legendary — Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, Roy Krenkel, Wally Wood and Joe Orlando all turned up in the first handful of issues. The series survived the 1954 Senate subcommittee hearings on juvenile delinquency only by retreating: it was briefly rebranded Young Heroes (issues #35–37, 1955) before returning with a tamer subtitle, "Stories of Strange Adventure". It ultimately ran 145 issues to August 1967, won the 1964 Alley Award for Best Regularly Published Fantasy Comic, and introduced Herbie Popnecker along the way.

Issue #4 matters today precisely because it sits in the narrow, unrepeatable window before the Comics Code — horror written for a mass juvenile audience with no external censor, and no idea one was coming. Read now, its werewolves, voodoo queens and lunar abductors are a compact snapshot of what American popular culture found frightening in 1952: the wilderness, the exotic, the sleeping self, and outer space. The fan-written story is a small piece of comics-history evidence in its own right — an early, documented instance of a publisher letting its readers into the pages. And because the 1952 material is generally treated as public domain in the United States, this issue is freely readable through archives such as Comic Book Plus and the Digital Comic Museum, making it one of the more accessible primary sources for anyone studying pre-Code horror without the EC canon's price tag.