This comes out of a discussion on another thread about Roger Sherman Hoar writing under the pseudonym “Ralph Milne Farley” . It got me thinking.
I first came across Farley’s works when Ace books reprinted “The Radio Beasts” and “The Radio Planet” in the 1960s and 1970s. Curiously, they didn’t print the first book in the series, “The Radio Man”. Maybe they couldn’t get the rights – that book had been published in paperback in the 1950s under the title “An Earthman on Venus”.
Farley’s series was in the line of planetary romances like Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter series and those of his imitators (like Otis Adelbert Kline). Earthman with military and/or upper class background finds himself teleported to an alien planet and fights the weird animals he finds there, ultimately ending up with the (surprisingly humanoid) alien princess. The twit in Farley’s case is that the Venusians communicate via radio (hence the titles in the series), so Farley’s hero Myles Cabot (is there more upper-crusty Massachusetts hero’s name?) can’t talk to his Venus paramour until he constructs a portable radio set.
(Ace not publishing the first book in the series meant that readers had to sort of figure out what had happened before. It’s as if they published Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars series without publishing the first book, “A Princess of Mars”, which explains how Carter got to Mars and got Dejah Thoris.)
Eventually I was able to purchase reprint of the first book, so I finally got it all straight. It turned out that Farley wrote innumerable sequels, most of which I haven’t read.
In any event, it turns out that Venus is inhabited not only by radio-equipped humanoids, but also by human-sized intelligent ants (which also communicate via radio – those antennae, you see.)
So you’ve got a hero who is the size of the local ants and who wears a special headset so that he can communicate with those ants via radio. Does this sound familiar?
But wait, you say – that’s kind of a big leap, from a printed novella to a different charcter with similar features in a comic book. Ah, but there was a chrysalis stage in between. In 1951 a one-shot comic book adaptation of An Earthman on Venus was published . The impressive Wally Wood did the artwork. It was reprinted in the comic Strange Planets #11 in 1963, which you can read here
https://digitalcomicmuseum.com/index.php?dlid=27930
Info here – https://www.comics.org/issue/14127/
Here’s the oiginal 1951 comic – https://www.comics.org/issue/9320/#84493
I wonder if they reprinted it in 1963 in response to the first appearance of Ant Man in Tales to Astonish (as “The Man in the Anthill”) the previous year.
Reprint of the original novel
Full text of the novel on project gutenberg