# Did Ralph Milne Farley's "The Radio Man" inspire Marvel's Ant Man? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Tags:** comic-books-manga\ **Created:** [September 19, 2024, 12:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ralph-milne-farleys-the-radio-man-inspire-marvels-ant-man/1007466 "2024-09-19T12:49:01Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2024, 12:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ralph-milne-farleys-the-radio-man-inspire-marvels-ant-man/1007466/1 "2024-09-19T12:49:02Z")
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? > **[Comics to Screen: Ant-Man](https://mostlyfilm.com/2015/07/29/comics-to-screen-ant-man/)** > > The latest in the occasional series in which Matthew Turner traces the journeys of Marvel superheroes from four-colour panel to shiny DCP. Spoilers for Ant-Man, after the jump, obvs. Come back afte… > **[Amazon.com: Ant-Man and the Wasp: My Mighty Marvel First Book: 9781419766657:...](https://www.amazon.com/Ant-Man-Wasp-Mighty-Marvel-First/dp/1419766651)** > > Amazon.com: Ant-Man and the Wasp: My Mighty Marvel First Book: 9781419766657: Marvel Entertainment, Kirby, Jack, Ayers, Dick, Heck, Don: Books 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](https://digitalcomicmuseum.com/index.php?dlid=27930) Info here – [https://www.comics.org/issue/14127/](https://www.comics.org/issue/14127/) Here’s the oiginal 1951 comic – [https://www.comics.org/issue/9320/#84493](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 > **[An Earthman on Venus, Illustrated Edition: Farley, Ralph Milne: 9781983691881:...](https://www.amazon.com/Earthman-Venus-Illustrated-Ralph-Farley/dp/1983691887)** > > An Earthman on Venus, Illustrated Edition \[Farley, Ralph Milne\] on Amazon.com. \*FREE\* shipping on qualifying offers. An Earthman on Venus, Illustrated Edition Full text of the novel on project gutenberg > **[An Earthman on Venus (Originally titled "The Radio Man") by Ralph Milne Farley](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/52167)** > > Free kindle book and epub digitized and proofread by volunteers. ---
**Author:** ![Frodo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/frodo/32/302_2.png) [@Frodo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frodo)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2024, 1:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ralph-milne-farleys-the-radio-man-inspire-marvels-ant-man/1007466/2 "2024-09-19T13:13:41Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > Myles Cabot (is there more upper-crusty Massachusetts hero’s name?) > [@New England ditty](#): > > And this is good old Boston, > The home of the bean and the cod, > Where the Lowells speak only to Cabots, > And the Cabots speak only to God. (Only I remembered this as the _Kanes_ only speak to Cabots, because of Jeffrey Archer) ---
**Author:** ![Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/elmer_j.fudd/32/1211_2.png) [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elmer_J.Fudd)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2024, 2:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ralph-milne-farleys-the-radio-man-inspire-marvels-ant-man/1007466/3 "2024-09-20T02:26:38Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > 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. Or…the decision to make Ant-Man a regular costumed (and helmeted) superhero in September was influenced by the 1963 reprint. Pym was just a hapless scientist befriended by a particular ant in his January debut (_Astonish_ 27). No helmet or psychic connection with the ants were apparent in that first story. It looks like _Strange Planet_ came out at the beginning of the year around the same time as the Pym one-off, but before Ant-Man became a recurring feature in _Astonish 35_. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2024, 11:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ralph-milne-farleys-the-radio-man-inspire-marvels-ant-man/1007466/4 "2024-09-20T11:55:55Z")
> [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](#): > > Or…the decision to make Ant-Man a regular costumed (and helmeted) superhero in September was influenced by the 1963 reprint. Pym was just a hapless scientist befriended by a particular ant in his January debut (_Astonish_ 27). Could be, although I observe that Myles Cabot was befriended by one particular ant (which he named _doggo_, because it was like a friendly dog) while he still lacked his radio headpiece. It could be that the reprint pushed him that way, or it could be that they intended it to go that way. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2024, 12:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ralph-milne-farleys-the-radio-man-inspire-marvels-ant-man/1007466/5 "2024-09-20T12:04:17Z")
Gotta say, in any case, good observation. DC was already coming out with new costumed heroes like The Flash, so it made sense for Marvel to try and join the race.