Forbidden Worlds #5 (American Comics Group, cover-dated March–April 1952) is an eight-story pre-Code anthology and one of the most artistically loaded issues of ACG's early supernatural run. The line-up moves from Gothic house horror to pulp science fiction without pausing for breath: "The Tomb of Terror" sends a doctor into the evil that inhabits the ancient manor of Stormway Hall; "Priestess of the Sphinx" strands an American couple in Egypt with the monument's horrifying secret; "The Merman Menace", "Dance of the Savages", "Circe, the Sorceress" and the apocalyptic "The Day the World Died" fill out the middle; "Rocket for Two" supplies the space-age angle. The standout is the closer, "Land of the Living Dead" — a dead man writes in to Forbidden Worlds itself in an attempt to clear his name — drawn by Al Williamson and Roy G. Krenkel (credited in the book under the joint pseudonym Roy G. Williams), with additional interior art across the issue by Lou Cameron, Lin Streeter, George Wilhelms and Al Camy. The cover is by Ken Bald, the editor Richard E. Hughes.

Forbidden Worlds launched in July/August 1951 as a 52-page dime comic subtitled "Exploring the Supernatural!", the companion title to ACG's Adventures into the Unknown — the medium's first ongoing horror series. ACG was a small, fiercely independent New York publisher founded by Benjamin W. Sangor and co-owned by Fred Iger, and its horror books cultivated a house style distinct from the competition: atmospheric and often wry, far lighter on gore and sexual content than the EC and Harvey books of the same moment, which is one reason both ACG horror titles survived the 1954 Senate subcommittee hearings and the Comics Code with relatively little alteration. The early issues were also a proving ground for extraordinary young talent — Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, Roy Krenkel, Wally Wood and Joe Orlando all pass through the first handful of numbers. The series ran 145 issues to August 1967, was briefly rebranded Young Heroes in 1955, won the 1964 Alley Award for Best Regularly Published Fantasy Comic, and introduced Herbie Popnecker along the way.

Issue #5 is worth attention today mainly for the Williamson–Krenkel collaboration, produced when both men were barely into their twenties and just beginning the careers that would make them fixtures of science-fiction illustration; the story's splash page has since been reproduced in Fantagraphics' Atlas Artist Edition devoted to Williamson. Beyond the art, the issue is a compact index of what American popular culture found unsettling in 1952: cursed archaeology, the sea, the sorceress, and — in "The Day the World Died" — the barely disguised nuclear anxiety of the early Cold War. And because the 1952 material is generally treated as public domain in the United States, this issue remains freely readable through archives such as Comic Book Plus and the Digital Comic Museum, making it an unusually accessible primary source for pre-Code horror outside the expensive EC canon.