ARKABAHÇE YAYINCILIK: TURKEY'S LEADING PUBLISHER OF AMERICAN SUPERHERO COMICS
	Comics had flourished in Turkey from mid-1950s onwards until late 1970s and then went into a decline in 1980s, almost disappaering from newsstands by mid-1990s. A new comics mini-boom, though nowhere on a comparable scale to the previous decades, started in the second half of the 1990s and Ahmet Kocaoğlu's Batman was its antecedent. Kocaoğlu was a comics fan running a shop named Gerekli Şeyler (Needful Things) selling imported American comics as well as frp material and the like. In 1995, he began publishing Batman from his own Büyük Mavi Yayıncılık (Big Blue Publications) label. The novelty of Büyük Mavi's Batman for Turkey was that it was the first-time ever an American super-hero comics was being published in its original form, that is in color and with original cover art. However, the sales of Batman were not sufficient enough: it started with around 10 thousand and quickly fell below 5 thousand; hence, its publication was ceased after 15 issues. And yet, Kocaoğlu's efforts had apparently left an impression and when one of Turkey's media giants, Medi Grup, launched a comics line in 1996, Kocaoğlu was appointed to run it. Sadly, that experiment lasted even shorter. Nothing was heard from Kocaoğlu until June 1998 when a new series of Spider-Man hit the news stands. Kocaoğlu had established a new comics line named Arkabahçe Yayıncılık (Backgarden Publications). The sales of Spider-Man must have been promising enough this time to encourage Kocaoğlu to put out several additional titles next year: Superman, Spawn and Witchblade, the latter two in their Turkish debuts. However, the new titles proved short-lived and even the flag-ship Spider-Man was halted in 2000. Nothing was heard from Kocaoğlu for a second period until Arkabahçe began to continue Spider-Man in 2002 from where it had left. In the summer of 2002, Arkabahçe launced an ambitions drive and began publishing several additional titles: Ultimate Spider-Man, X-Men and Ultimate X-Men (as well as a 7-issue Batman series to round up the story-line began in Büyük Mavi's). Other titles eventually put out by Arkabahçe were Daredevil and Hulk, the former in its Turkish debut. In 2003, Arkabahçe also published a 4-issue Turkish super-hero comics titled Karabasan. Despite this apparent upsurge in titles, which must have been encouragred by the box-office successes in Turkey of comics-adaptations by Hollywood, actual sales of comics was not faring well enough; for instance Ultimate X-Men, which (for some reason) Kocaoğlu had high hopes of, had started with around 10 thousand copies and stuck down to around 5 thousand, indicating not much of a progress from mid-1990s when Kocaoğlu had first started with Batman. Meanwhile, Arkabahçe had also began to experiment with publishing comics books such as Sandman. Publishing comics books for bookshops (a trend pursued by Maceraperest Çizgiler since 1999) rather than monthly comics magazines for newsstands seemed a safer bet and in 2004, Arkabahçe ceased all its monthly titles. Some of the comics books published by Arkabahçe since then include Günah Şehri (Sin City).