Forbidden Worlds #6 (American Comics Group, May 1952) is a densely packed nine-story pre-Code anthology behind one of Ken Bald's most unsubtle covers — a rampaging giant ape whose resemblance to King Kong, as one dealer catalogue dryly notes, is purely commercial. Inside, the issue swings from jungle adventure to metafictional horror: "The Domain of the Dead" follows an adventurous medical researcher who gets rather more than he bargained for in the backcountry of Brazil; "The Devil's Typewriter!" has a writer sell his soul for the privilege of telling this very story; and "The African Were-Jackals" delivers the issue's title-card monster. The rest of the line-up — "The Haunted Gallery", "The Sorcerer's Play-Kit", "The Flapping Head", "The Haunting Refrain", "Strangler's Spirit" and "Bride of the Beast" — runs through possessed art, cursed toys, disembodied heads and monstrous marriages at a pace of roughly five pages a nightmare. Interior art comes from Al Williamson, Pete Riss, Sam Cooper, Paul Gattuso and Paul Gustavson (creator of The Human Bomb and the Angel), under editor 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, and its horror line cultivated a house style noticeably distinct from the competition: atmospheric, frequently wry, and far lighter on gore and sexual content than the EC and Harvey books of the same year. That restraint is one reason both ACG horror titles survived the 1954 Senate subcommittee hearings and the arrival of the Comics Code without wholesale reinvention. The early issues doubled as a proving ground for young talent later regarded as legendary — Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, Roy Krenkel, Wally Wood and Joe Orlando all pass through the first dozen numbers. The series ran 145 issues to August 1967, was briefly rebranded Young Heroes in 1955, and won the 1964 Alley Award for Best Regularly Published Fantasy Comic.

Read today, issue #6 is a useful corrective to the assumption that pre-Code horror meant EC-style shock. This is horror as volume business — nine stories in 44 pages for a dime, built on folklore, colonial-adventure pulp and Universal-monster iconography rather than on gore. "The Devil's Typewriter!" is a small delight of early comics self-reference, a Faustian bargain whose payoff is the existence of the page you are reading. The issue is also an Al Williamson data point from the months just before he became a fixture at EC. And because the 1952 material is generally treated as public domain in the United States, this number remains freely readable through Comic Book Plus and the Digital Comic Museum — a rare case where a primary source from the genre's most notorious era costs nothing to consult.