Peter Parker papers
Today: Zach Rabiroff, a writer on books, comics, and culture living in Brooklyn, New York, and Josephine Riesman, New York Times bestselling author of Ringmaster and True Believer.
Issue No. 342
A Swingin’ Surprise or Two
Zach Rabiroff and Josephine Riesman
HYDRANYM No. 4
The Editors
A Swingin’ Surprise or Two
by Zach Rabiroff and Josephine Riesman
The best-kept secret in the history of Marvel Comics was in high dudgeon by the time he sat down at his typewriter. It was a July afternoon in 1971, and Ron Whyte, a playwright and activist, was about to hammer out an ill-advised letter. Truth be told, there may have been some pills involved: he had just finished the 15-minute-plus ordeal of strapping on the prosthetics that he had used to walk since the age of 20, when the doctors had amputated what remained of his legs, and he’d long since relied on a variety of drugs for help with the many kinds of pain he experienced as a gay, poor, legally blind, paraplegic double amputee.
“Dear Caz,” he began, in a letter to Camille “Caz” Cazedessus Jr., one of the leading lights of Edgar Rice Burroughs fandom (Whyte having long been part of that scene) and he was off to the races. In page after page, double-sided and without paragraph breaks, Whyte uncorked a torrent of frantic, relentless, vitriolic words on subjects including a magazine profile that had been written about him after the premiere of his first film, Valentine Eve (1967) and the covert phallic metaphors in Whyte’s children’s book The Flower That Finally Grew. (“The flower in this case quite clearly means an erect penis, but our editor missed it, and so did Captain Kangaroo, or he wouldn’t be babbling it to all the kiddie-winks all the time.”) All of which only gets us to page two of a 53-page letter. Words tended to pour out of Ron Whyte.
By page three, he had really gotten himself into a mood on the topic of Marvel Comics editor Stan Lee and Lee’s protégé, Roy Thomas:
Keep us breathing fire!
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