Forbidden Worlds #22 (American Comics Group, October 1953) is a pre-Code horror and fantasy anthology from the last full year of the genre's freedom, edited — as every issue of the series was — by Richard E. Hughes, behind a cover by Ken Bald. By late 1953 the book's formula was fixed: a 32-page, full-colour, ten-cent newsstand comic assembled from five or six unsigned self-contained stories, produced by a tight rotating pool of freelancers that by this point included Harry Lazarus, Bob Forgione, Charles Nicholas, Art Gates, Leo Morey, Dick Beck and Robert McCarty. The issue follows directly on #21 (September 1953), whose Bald giant-ant cover for "The Ant Master!" is among the most collected in the run. A verified per-story listing for #22 could not be established from the priority sources and should be checked against the Grand Comics Database entry before publication.

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, where dozens of rival titles simply folded. The series ran 145 issues to August 1967, went on hiatus after #34 (December 1954), briefly reappeared as Young Heroes, and later won the 1964 Alley Award for Best Regularly Published Fantasy Comic.

October 1953 puts this issue roughly six months before the storm. Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent appeared in spring 1954, the Senate subcommittee hearings followed that April, and the Comics Code Authority was in place by autumn — after which stories involving the walking dead, vampires, ghouls and werewolves were flatly prohibited. Everything that made a book like this one saleable was about to become unpublishable. That is the value of an ordinary mid-run number: it records the genre operating at full confidence, monthly, for a dime, with no idea that it had less than a year left. 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.