Shirrel Rhoades

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Shirrel Rhoades

Shirrel Rhoades in 2007
Birth name Shirrel Rhoades
Born May 19, 1942 (1942-05-19) (age 66)
North Wilkesboro, NC
Nationality American
Area(s) Writer, Publisher, Professor, Filmmaker
Notable works Marvel Comics,Reader's Digest, Cricket, Harper's Magazine, Ladies Home Journal, Opportunity Magazine, Magazines: A Complete Guide to the Industry, Comics Books: How the Industry Works, A Complete History of American Comic Books
Awards Associated Press


Shirrel Rhoades [ˈʃɜrʌl roʊdz] (born May 19, 1942) is an American writer, publisher, professor, filmmaker, and the former Executive Vice President of Marvel Entertainment.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early Life

Shirrel Rhoades was born in rural Wilkes County, North Carolina. His father owned a furniture store where his mother helped out. He has a brother, Bill, and a sister named Dawn, both younger by ten and thirteen years. His parents divorced while he was in his teens and Shirrel's father died shortly afterword in an automobile accident.

The name Shirrel, which rhymes with 'squirrel', remains a mystery as to its origin. Situated at the foot of the Blue Ridge Parkway, his hometown of North Wilkesboro is noteworthy as the first location of the hardware chain Lowe's, and nearby is one of the world’s largest chicken processing plants.

[edit] Education

Rhoades was raised in the Mulberry community, once the site of a Cherokee village. In grade school he was known as an amateur magician. He became friends with the poet James Larkin Pearson. Later, many of Pearson’s personal papers would be left to his care.

Attending Wilkes Central High School, Rhoades became the yearbook photographer. Among his high school classmates were Roger Gambill of the Kingston Trio and Billy Swofford who had a run of popularity as the singer known as Oliver.

Graduating in 1960, Rhoades attended Wake Forest University as a George Foster Hankins scholar. After his sophomore year, he transferred to Stetson University in order to major in Fine Art, graduating and receiving a BA in 1964. Rhoades says, "My art professor told me I had to make a choice, that I couldn’t be both a photographer and a artist, so I became a writer."

[edit] Publishing Career

[edit] Early Writing

After college, Rhoades took a job as layout artist with The Florida Times-Union, the largest newspaper in northern Florida. After demonstrating his writing skills with a series of book reviews, he was invited to write at a feature article and. In a short time he had become the Sunday Magazine’s assistant editor and chief feature writer, as well as the newspaper’s film and theatre critic.

Shirrel went undercover with high school students, sailplane pilots, submariners with Navy air squadrons, ambulance drivers, waiters, and migrant workers. The resulting articles won several Florida Press and Associated Press awards.

[edit] Travel & Specialty Publications

In 1968, Rhoades became the Executive Editor of Etienne Dupuch Jr. Publications, the Nassau-based publisher of The Bahamas Business Handbook and other travel and education titles. In 1972, he launched Directions (a travel magazine for the Great Smoky Mountains region) and an annual book series and quarterly travel publication about the Cayman Islands, having written and photographed the initial editions of both.

After selling his interest to his partners in 1973, he joined Open Court Publishing in Illinois to launch Cricket, a literary magazine for children. As Vice President of Publishing, he oversaw the company's US- and London-based publications, including The Monist, a philosophical journal published since 1890.

[edit] Mainstream Magazines

In 1976, Shirrel Rhoades became Associate Publisher of Harper's Magazine, the oldest monthly magazine in America. The publication was at that time owned by the Minneapolis Star Tribune where Rhoades worked with Lewis Lapham, editor of the New York-based Harper's. Three years later, he was recruited to Charter Publishing as Vice President of Consumer Marketing for Ladies' Home Journal, Redbook, and Sport, magazines with a combined circulation of 11.5 million.

After Charter sold off its publishing properties, Rhoades joined Scholastic to launch Family Computing magazine. As Vice President, he oversaw the company's range of computer and and children's magazines, including Early Childhood Today. In 1988, Rhoades cashed out his Scholastic stock options and purchased his own periodical, Opportunity Magazine. Later he would launch and a sister publication, Income Plus, both aimed at small business entrepreneurs.

[edit] The Comic Wars

In 1996, Rhoades became Executive Vice President of Marvel Entertainment and Publisher of Marvel Comics, a position in which he succeeded Stan Lee. During his tenure, Marvel underwent a high-stakes battle for control the company between rival billionaire moguls Ronald O. Perelman and Carl Icahn. At Marvel, Rhoades reported to five different presidents and four chairmen under four periods of different ownership.

When Rhoades joined the company, the publishing division was losing money. When he left it was the only division not making money. Under his management, Marvel Comics dominated the industry with a 27% market share. The company produced 16 of the top 20 bestselling comic book titles, including Spider-Man, X-Men, and Fantastic Four. Says Rhoades, "The fact that we held the business together during those turbulent times was a very significant achievement. The collapse of Marvel might have pulled down the entire comic book industry." Rhoades, along with all the other Marvel execs, was squeezed out when the company was eventually taken over by new owners. In 1999, Shirrel joined Reader's Digest as Vice President of New Business Development.

[edit] Direct Marketing

Shirrel Rhoades has served on the board of directors of American Family Publishers and on the advisory board of the New York Academy of Sciences. He was nominated for the Direct Marketing Association Hall of Fame in 1997 and again for the Circulation Hall of Fame in 1998. During the 1980s, he was chairman of the Consumer Marketing Committee for Magazine Publishers of America and a member of their Finance Committee. His direct marketing campaigns have won numerous industry awards.

Shirrel continues to consult for a number of periodicals. Past clients run the gamut from Penthouse and New York to Harvard Health Newsletters, Disney, and MAD magazine where his 2005 launch of MAD Kids was named one of the 300 best new magazines of the year.

[edit] Writer & Educator

[edit] Author & Publisher

Recent books by Shirrel Rhoades include Magazines: A Complete Guide to the Industry (with Dr. David E. Sumner), Comic Books: How the Industry Works, and A Complete History of American Comic Books. He is the author of more than 500 bylined feature articles published in popular magazines, as well as hundreds of other essays on history, book reviews, and film critiques.

Shirrel was publisher of a number of Reader's Digest books, including the annual title Medical Breakthroughs and the popular reference tome, The Healing Power of Vitamins, Minerals and Herbs, which sold more than 6-million copies worldwide. Rhoades has also negotiated book rights for popular do-it-yourself TV programs and licensing deals with DC Comics. Shirrel Rhoades was instrumental in publishing several lost works by William R. Burkett, Jr., author of the sci-fi title Sleeping Planet. Today, he works with a literary agency to package special interest books.

[edit] Professor & Lecturer

As an adjunct associate professor, Rhoades taught for 17 years in New York University's Center for Publishing. Many of today’s senior publishing execs were his students in classes such as Magazine Management, Consumer Marketing, and one titled How Magazines Work. Rhoades is a frequent speaker at publishing industry conferences and has led numerous sessions at the Magazine Publishers of America’s Summer Intern Program, the Multicultural Publishing Program, and the Publishing Generalist Seminar. He also served as associate chair of the Association's Education Committee.

Over the years, Shirrel Rhoades has lectured at Columbia University, Radcliff, The Rochester Institute of Technology, Baruch College, The University of Texas, University of Florida, Ball State University, and other colleges. Topics of his sessions have included magazine publishing, comic book history, and fine art photography.

[edit] Museum President & Folk Historian

While living in the Bahamas, Shirrel collected local folktales known as B'Booki and B'Rabbi (the origin of Joel Chandler Harris's Br'er Rabbit tales) and stories about Chickcharnies, the leprechaun-like creatures said to inhabit the island of Andros. He believes his to be the largest such collection in existence.

[edit] Photographer

Rhoades developed an interest in photography in his early teens and signed on as an apprentice to a commercial photographer named Ed Gilreath. He learned portraiture and still life photography by assisting Gilreath with weddings, furniture set-ups, and formal portraits. In college, he freelanced as a photographer, shooting prom pictures, fraternity parties, and yearbook photos.

At Stetson University, Rhoades met Larry Colwell, a photographer who had been a part of Edward Weston's Group f/64. Down on his luck, Colwell was working as a portrait photographer in a small college-town photo studio. Taking the student under his wing, Colwell trained Rhoades in an approach known as purist photography, a depictive technique that rejects manipulation and aims for an objective view of reality.

Later, while working for The Florida Times-Union, Rhoades participated in weekend photography outings led by Colwell. Several members of the group became successful photographers and newspaper editors. At the same paper, Rhoades worked with Rocco Morabito, winner of 1968 Pulitzer Prize for his photo Kiss of Life.

Rhoades's photographs have been published in the Popular Photography Annual and have appeared as photo essays in several magazines. He has also participated in a number of group and solo exhibitions.

[edit] Filmmaker & Critic

[edit] Producer

Rhoades was involved in several of Marvel's superhero movies and he negotiated the credits for Men in Black. He is an investor in film production companies which control the rights to several feature films and documentaries, including All God's Children (optioned to Jason Connery) and a documentary about the emperor Haile Selassie in conjunction with the emperor's grandson, President of the Ethiopian Crown Council. Rhoades and his partners also own the rights to several horror films.

[edit] Film Critic

A longtime film buff, Rhoades was the film and theater critic for the Florida Times-Union in the mid 1960s. At the time, Jacksonville was the distribution point for motion picture releasing in Florida, with many movie studios and theatre chains maintaining offices there, and Shirrel's reviews were often quoted in movie promotions. He received a personal citation from Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association of America.

[edit] References

[edit] External links