A Swingin’ Surprise or Two
by Zach Rabiroff and Josephine Riesman
This article was originally published at Flaming Hydra, and the original can be found here.
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:
Stan Lee is knee-high to a toad and I apologize to all toads – but then, you really have to know Stan to loathe Stan. I have a few words about Roy Thomas that would blister paint on a tank but I am certain you can live without comic book gossip: Roy is a true fool and a cut throat pig, and has not been too fond of [me] since I called him Miss Thomas…
A long stream of virulent invective followed, and then it was back to Stan:
I never truly knew the meaning of the word sycophant-thief-hack-shuckster-snake-oil-salesman before I met Stan, and you truly have to know the man and have worked with him to understand in all its ramifications the word “Fool”...
But wait. Back up a little. Submerged in the cascade, there is something interesting:
Most of the work I did at Marvel is not signed by me: I just did the plot or a few pages or what have you and Roy or Stan signed it: though they would both shriek like the wimps they are if they were accused of such a thing…
Later in the letter, Whyte tells a story of Stan Lee calling him in because he, alone among the ranks of Marvel Comics, was known to be gay. Apparently, Stan was flipping out because a fan had written a letter about one of Marvel’s heroes scanning as gay, so now he wanted to assess whether any of the characters he marshaled were coming across as a little… you know…
“Stan got worried about the Hulk,” Whyte wrote. “He couldn’t be gay because he was green. Fags aren’t green.”
The truth of many or even most of these uninhibited remarks is open to question. But what we do know is that Ron Whyte was at Marvel Comics in 1966, where he did work with Stan Lee and Roy Thomas, Jack Kirby, John Romita, and Wally Wood, and all the other leading lights of that early heyday of the Marvel Age. And curiously, in the large collection of Ron Whyte’s papers at Yale University—he got an MFA in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama in 1967—tucked away amid his scripts for films and plays, audiotape reels, cassettes and albums, videotapes, and personal letters, there are scripts for some of the most storied and beloved comics of that period.
Comics eventually published in Stan Lee’s name.
These scripts are not supposed to exist. Whether Whyte wrote them himself, collaborated on them, or simply salvaged them, they have never been previously studied or even acknowledged by anyone in the comics industry, least of all Marvel or Disney.
Despite his later rise into minor theatrical fame, his off-Broadway plays, his film and television credits, a Pulitzer nomination, and decades of activism for the disabled, there is no published record to speak of documenting Whyte’s career at Marvel Comics. His contributions—which look an awful lot like ghostwriting for the famous Stan Lee, a deception never before proven—were a secret so well kept, one doubts the current generation of corporate suits at Disney even knows about them anymore.
Nearly 60 years after Ron Whyte walked out of Marvel on his prosthetic legs for the last time, hardly anyone there—or anywhere, really—knows he existed at all.
**********
Ron Whyte was born in Great Falls, Montana on November 8, 1941. He was born with underdeveloped legs, an unusable left hand, and low vision. Doctors told his parents he would never walk.
They were wrong: Whyte’s father, a machinist for the Great Northern Railroad, built leg braces that allowed his son to walk for a time. But in his senior year of high school, a school bus ran over both of his ankles, leaving him paraplegic. In his final year at San Francisco State College, both of his legs were amputated below the knee. As an adult he sometimes used a wheelchair or crutches, sometimes a pair of prosthetic legs, and sometimes a prosthetic left hand.
As a kid, Whyte was a voracious reader of science fiction. By high school he was active in early fandom communities, corresponding and creating newsletters with fellow sci-fi and mystery enthusiasts across the country, and composing lines for original operas that combined Lewis Carroll and Sherlock Holmes. During his first year as a graduate student at the Yale School of Drama, he sent off a letter to Stan Lee, and found himself in receipt of a reply. He started working at Marvel Comics in the pivotal year of 1966.
Just a few months prior, in November of 1965, Steve Ditko had quit the company after a long period of frosty acrimony with Lee. Ditko had been one of Marvel’s key creative figures, and his departure was consequential, in part because of the artist-intensive process by which Marvel’s comics were made, which would eventually be dubbed the Marvel Method.
It went like this: Before Stan Lee flipped the process on its head, comic books had typically been composed in an assembly-line procedure, with a writer fashioning a plot and writing out a full script, and artists subsequently drawing the story as written. The Marvel Method dictated that it was the artist, not the writer, who blocked out the storylines as they drew, in many cases along with story concepts, character creations, and even extensive dialogue suggestions in the margins of their art. Lee wrote dialogue and captions for the completed art, typed up in a script to be handed off to a letterer. These scripts, with a tiny number of exceptions, were presumed to have been discarded.
Ditko’s departure left Marvel minus one talented artist, but also minus one of their powerhouse writers—though Lee would have been the last to admit it. The loss could not have come at a worse time. Comics in 1966 were at the frothing center of a surging youth culture: that September Esquire ran a “college issue,” and the centerpiece was a photo spread on Marvel Comics, complete with Jack Kirby illustrations in blazing color.
It was into this expansive atmosphere, complete with new and larger digs, that Ron Whyte arrived.
Roy Thomas was then an assistant editor and Stan’s right hand. According to him, it was Whyte’s reputation as a budding Ivy League playwright that had caught Lee’s eye.
“He had written a play in college that had won some sort of award, and that’s about all I ever knew about that,” Thomas says. “Stan never mentioned whether he actually read the play, but Stan knew about the play somehow.”
Whyte became a fixture in Marvel’s offices from Monday through Friday over the year that followed—more so, indeed, than either Thomas or Lee themselves—sitting in on private story conferences between Lee and artists like Jack Kirby and John Romita, writing letter pages (the one- or two-page prose columns composed of fan mail and editorial replies at the end of an issue of Spider-Man or Tales of Suspense) and other ancillary items, and working one-on-one with Lee to plot out the storylines of Marvel’s ongoing titles.
Astoundingly enough for any historian of comics, Whyte kept notebooks during those private sessions with Lee, and throughout his time at Marvel. For example: “Hero always has to save the day by his own wit,” Lee told him, explaining the structure of superhero stories. Lee coached Whyte on the selection of and responses to readers’ letters; these latter notes include telling descriptions of the way Stan Lee’s Marvel carefully walked the line between gesturing toward coolness among the radical ’60s set, while in reality avoiding actual political commitment.
“Don’t print radical, or violet [sic] letters pushing ANY cause,” reads one note from Lee.
“The motto is—provocative but harmless,” reads another.
One of the most astonishing documents in Whyte’s files concerns his role in Stan Lee’s writing. Under the heading “The Secrets of Spidey,” Whyte includes a page of his own headed “Steps in a Plotting sequence.”
New villain (Ok!)
Draft: counsel with the artist (John Romita)
1st draft outline submitted by RW (& Romita) to Stan Lee with Stan Lee annotations
In other words, in a private document known only to himself, Whyte is saying that he and John Romita were, together, crafting—or ghostwriting, if you like—Spider-Man plots ultimately attributed to Stan Lee.
This idea would be easy enough to dismiss as fantasy, were it not for the document that follows in Whyte’s files: a typed outline, composed on a Marvel typewriter, of the plot for Amazing Spider-Man #44—a memorable showdown between Spidey and his nemesis The Lizard. (Marvel typewriters had distinctive typefaces; we could compare the scripts in Whyte's files to photos of the known script found by Ben Saunders, which he was kind enough to send.)
What we’re looking at is a step-by-step breakdown of an approved story that would eventually make its way into one of the earliest post-Steve Ditko issues of Marvel’s flagship series. Whyte’s outline differs from the published issue in some key respects (a running subplot about Peter Parker going out for the football team didn’t make the cut), but many elements remained, some of which even seem like they could have been drawn from Whyte’s own life. Disability, for example, is key.
Over and over again in both the outline and the final issue, the plot places emphasis on problems with the characters’ limbs. There’s the Lizard, a scientist named Curt Connors whose tragic monstrousness is driven by a desire to regrow a missing right arm; when he transforms into the Lizard, the transformation starts in his left hand, which swells with inhuman scales. Then there’s Spider-Man himself, whose left arm gets broken in the course of the storyline (“Never realized how tough it is to do the simplest things with only one arm!” Peter will lament in the finished script).
Maybe we should stop ourselves before we go too far with all this. Certainly Whyte’s personal writings, written much later, claim he had a direct role in the writing of these stories. But as for the truth, all we have are his preserved documents.
The Marvel Method made assigning credit anything but simple, and Lee especially was notorious for putting his name on stories for which he merited considerably less than solo credit. Ditko, when he had been on Spider-Man, had written the entire final year of stories entirely on his own (to the extent that he became Marvel’s first artist ever to receive explicit credit as plotter on a comic), with Lee adding finished dialogue only after seeing the completed artwork. Kirby, for at least a substantial stretch of his collaborations with Lee, did likewise. And Ditko’s successor on Spider-Man, John Romita, recalls the full extent of some of the more famed “plotting sessions” with Lee:
The only thing [Lee] used to do from 1966-72 was come in and leave a note on my drawing table saying “Next month, the Rhino.” That’s all; he wouldn’t tell me anything; how to handle it…We would have a verbal plot together. First it was two or three hours, then it was an hour. Stan would tell me who he would like to be the villain, and personal life “threads” he would like carried on. Generally we would select the setting; sometimes we wouldn’t even have time to select the settings, like “it takes place on a subway.” He would give me that, and tell me where he wanted it to end. I would have to fill in all the blanks…
Romita is hardly alone in his description of the artist’s role in the actual writer per se of Marvel’s stories, so to that extent Whyte’s recollections might easily be overstating his case.
But in Yale’s Beneicke Library, where Ron Whyte’s voluminous hoarder’s archive is still being sorted, there are the typed scripts of three issues of Amazing Spider-Man. One of these is Amazing Spider-Man #42: The first appearance of comic book icon Mary Jane Watson, Spider-Man’s decades-long love interest and future spouse.
For a comics historian, discovering the original of this script is like discovering the handwritten first draft of the Ten Commandments in the files of Moses himself.
Until 2023—when a copy of the script for Amazing Spider-Man #82 was discovered by comics scholar Ben Saunders in the collection of a private art dealer—no Silver Age Marvel scripts were known to have survived. Here, in Whyte’s files, are 24 scripts in full: the largest and most significant archeological discovery by far of Marvel’s formative period.
This Spider-Man script is one of the most important of all. Ask someone to name the most memorable line of Stan Lee dialogue, and their first answer will probably be that tagline from Spider-Man’s origin story: “With great power, there must also come great responsibility!” But their second answer is likely to be the stunner of an entrance by MJ on the final page of Amazing Spider-Man #42: “Face it, tiger…you just hit the jackpot!”
Here, in all its glory, is an excerpt of the script itself, crossed-out attempts at MJ’s dialogue still included for readers to wonder over. Which raises the obvious question: what on earth was this script doing in the files of man who, until now, hardly anybody knew existed?
Where two dozen scripts can be found in Whyte’s files, Lee’s own archives at the University of Wyoming contain none at all. Maybe (as more than one former staffer was known to have done, with more potentially lucrative original artwork) Whyte availed himself of the chance to abscond with original scripts that no one imagined would hold any financial or historical value. Or maybe—as Whyte’s own later writings heavily imply—he had more to do with the stories themselves than anyone suspected. Certainly, the prose as written on those scripts is unmistakably Lee’s own patter. Beyond that, it’s lost behind a haze of Marvel Time.
There are more scripts in the archive—indeed, it is almost certainly the largest repository of original ’60s Marvel scripts in the world. If they represent, even in part, creative contributions by Whyte, it would mean that he had helped to craft issues of Tales to Astonish, The Avengers, The X-Men, and more. For a man who lived his life in shadows, some light is long overdue.
*********
Later in life, Whyte grew acerbic about his time at Marvel. He was soured by then; the years hadn’t been kind to him.
His files at Yale are littered with correspondence to insurance companies, aid organizations, and well-heeled friends, in which he lamented the cost of his medical care, his difficulty holding any kind of reliable income, his discontent with the world and how it had treated him. His tone wasn’t bitter so much as grimly unsurprised: this was the way the world treated the anonymous toilers who gave it art, after all. Marvel Comics had helped to teach him that.
In the last years of his life, Whyte wrote this about his time at the comic publisher:
Ron Whyte does not read comic books; neither does Stan Lee; nor did Martin Goodman, the publisher of Marvel (193901970); nor does James Galton, President of Cadence Industries Corp., (the current [as of Whyte’s writing] publisher of Marvel Comics.)
Ron Whyte believes with artist Jack Kirby that during the Golden Age of Marvel Comics, that Marvel Comics—at their best—had no “message”. That Marvel Comics, at their best, were pure and simple entertainment.
Elsewhere, writing about the 1966 Esquire profile of Marvel, during which he was on the scene, Whyte mused:
The crises [sic] at “Esquire” was “where the hell was Marvel Comics?” It certainly wasn’t with Stan. Or Jack [Kirby]. Or Marie [Severin] (then the Art Director)—so who the hell was the conscious and clever brains behind the Marvel phenomenon???? None of these people could conceivably hold the interest of an academician or a college student in a one-on-one. Only the Marvel “phenomenon” was real.
For Whyte, what Marvel was, and had always been, was not a monument of art but a monument of cultural self-invention. What fans saw in Marvel Comics, or told themselves they saw, was a manifestation of the way we wanted our 1960s to be: youthful, but in an erudite, Ivy League way; violent, but never threatening; unstintingly serious, but excused by a thick layer of camp it didn’t even realize it was wearing. Marvel was pop art in its purest form because it didn’t even know it was just a corporate product.
Maybe it was easier for Whyte to view Marvel as ephemeral because that’s the way Marvel had viewed him. We know he was contributing to Marvel stories, we know he was a fixture around the offices, and yet his existence in the world of comics (with the exception of a few scattered bylines at other publishers later on) was almost entirely forgotten — or erased. None of the legends who worked with him ever spoke of him.
One exception to this rule was former Marvel Comics editor Denny O’Neil, with whom Whyte maintained a friendship for a few years after they both left Marvel. When Whyte died in 1989, O’Neil, by then the editor of the Batman line of books at Marvel’s rival DC Comics, wrote an obituary in his monthly letter page column.
“Unless you’re a veteran comics reader, you probably haven’t heard of Ron Whyte,” O’Neil wrote. “About 23 years ago, he was an assistant to Stan Lee for a summer, and later did writing for Marvel, DC, and, I think, the now defunct Warren Publications.
O’Neil continued:
He was the bravest man I ever met. I don’t think there were many days of his adult life that Ron was without pain. Nature had been cruel to him. He once said that his body was “the battle of Antietam the morning after,” but he refused to let his infirmities deprive him of anything life had to offer. He joked, yes, and the humor could be dark indeed, but I never heard a word of self-pity from him.
The others at Marvel, those who managed to outlive him, had less glowing things to say. Roy Thomas, for his part, is emphatic that Whyte was not a ghostwriter for Stan Lee or anyone else. When we spoke to him about it in 2024, Thomas said that he could categorically deny that Whyte wrote any of the scripts or plot outlines found in his files “insofar as I can tell. Again, I wasn’t there, but I was around. Didn’t happen.”
Thomas does entertain the possibility that Whyte may have contributed to the plots found in Stan Lee’s comics, but he does not think the work went much beyond this: “I have read elsewhere that he claimed to have contributed plots and dialogues for the comics Stan wrote such as Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Thor, et cetera. But I assume that was mostly just fleshing out ideas that Stan gave him, just as I did once or twice. I find it impossible to believe that he ghost dialogued major comics for Stan, or if he was asked to try it, that Stan used much of what he wrote.”
“He did write a handful of published Western stories and Millie the Model stories,” Thomas adds, “but those were considered practically throwaway items by then. Stan didn't care much one way or the other…those were dying books.”
In a later email exchange, Thomas wrote, “Ron Whyte seems to have specialized, in his notes, in backdating attitudes, thoughts, and information…it’s hard for me to decide if he was a liar, or simply delusional.”
A bit later, in a subsequent email, Thomas took a more conciliatory tone.
“I have been greatly skeptical, and I think with good reason, of many of Ron Whyte’s claims about his ‘contribution’ to Marvel Comics in 1966,” Thomas told us. He continued:
However, to balance that out, I want to say that I admire the way he never, so far as I’m aware, ever tried to play the “disabilities card”or gain any sort of traction by reference to his disabilities. The fact that I was not even aware that he had lost his legs underscores that; I remember only that his hand and/or arm was shriveled, and this I took to be very little in the way of disabilities. He was more disabled than I knew... and he never referenced it enough around the office for it to come to my attention. He was, in many ways, a brave and determined guy, on top of his undoubted talent. I only wish he had had gifts of common sense and self-awareness to match those attributes.
There was much, in fact, that Whyte must not have drawn attention to. “I wasn’t particularly aware he was gay,” Thomas says. “And I suppose I considered that possibility, since I knew at least a couple of other gay people in New York City and elsewhere. But that didn’t make any difference to anyone in the office as far as I knew. I never heard anybody mention it. Stan never mentioned that possibility to me at any time.”
But here is the way Thomas remembers getting the news that Stan Lee was dismissing Ron Whyte from Marvel: “I guess in early September [1966] or right before, Stan took me aside privately and told me that he was going to let Ron go—Stan didn’t like to use the word fire—and he said it was because he found his writing, quote, ‘effeminate’—Stan’s word.”
Well.
“I don’t think he meant particularly homosexual, or gay, or whatever term would have been used in 1966,” Thomas continued. He meant, I think, just weak in a way that wouldn’t appeal to Marvel’s readership. He didn’t elaborate, and I neither defended Ron, nor did I say I particularly agreed. It was Stan’s decision.”
It must have stung, judging by the way Whyte remembered those years later on. It might also have been for the best. Another Marvel writer a bit after Whyte’s time, Gerry Conway, remembers Denny O’Neil mentioning Whyte in conversation from time to time. “Ron,” Conway recalls O’Neil saying, “was someone who got out.”
Ron Whyte died at home of a cerebral hemorrhage on September 13, 1989. He was sick, and broke, his once-promising career as a playwright having never reached its full potential. He’d worked for the federal government on disability advocacy, but lost his funding and position when Ronald Reagan became President.
The notes for his unfinished book are often characteristically bitter and cynical, but occasionally wistful about his time at the center of the superhero world, back when it the myths were first being told and everything really mattered. “For the proper person, it was more pleasure than work,” he wrote. “And I think we [were] all amazed to actually be paid for doing something so seriously and with expected standards of excellence—that was for us then, entertainment and play.”
But for all the joy and hope that Ron Whyte had held in his unusual body, he’d never forgotten how the world had wronged him. He even left a little message for the future about it.
In his final years, Whyte penned two short autobiographical operas, to be performed in tandem at his funeral. In the final line of the second opera, Whyte’s character sings words that might speak for his legacy: “Blackmail ’em with the truth.”
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