Forbidden Worlds #18 (American Comics Group, June 1953) leads with "The Mummy!", the cover feature and title story, in which the mummy of Rhames-Tut-Arkham figures in the sinister plans of a deranged archaeologist, with Diana Stillman and her father caught in the middle. The issue's other standout is "Vampire of the Deep": a castaway pulled aboard from the open sea turns out to be a finned aquatic vampire, and the rescue becomes a hunt conducted on a ship nobody can leave. "The Devil and Tommy Trent" pits competing spirits — Satan among them — against each other for the soul of a young gangster, a Faustian bargain played out at street level. "The Buried Curse" and the pseudo-historical "Salem Witch" complete the book, a full-colour, ten-cent package with interior art by Harry Lazarus, Charles Nicholas, Lin Streeter and Frank Sieminsky, under a Ken Bald cover and 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; 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. Issue #18 sits at the last calm moment of that story: within a year Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent and the Senate subcommittee would reshape the entire industry, and Forbidden Worlds would go on hiatus after #34 before returning in 1955 with a tamer subtitle.

Read today, issue #18 is a compact catalogue of the genre's three great imports — the Egyptian mummy, the sea monster and the Devil — each treated as a straightforward job of work rather than a set piece. "Vampire of the Deep" is the pick: the closed-ship setting does most of the work, and the idea of the rescued survivor as the monster predates by decades the many films that would make the same move. The "Salem Witch" feature also continues ACG's habit of slotting a pseudo-documentary history page into every issue, a device that let a horror comic present itself as educational. 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.