Being an avid comic book fan and professed geek (I’m wearing my Joker converse as I write this) I always find myself looking for comic shops when I move to a new city. After a few weeks I was guided to a store on Yeni Çarşı that satisfied my needs for a while, but gradually it became apparent that they weren’t going to change their stock very often and so I needed something more.
Sometime later, I was at the PTT in Beşiktaş, bored out of my mind, when I spotted Arka Bahçe. Nestled on the bottom floor of the Büyük Beşiktaş Çarşısı, it is a brightly-lit shop with huge windows for showing off their wares.
Gon, the comic store on Yeni Çarşı, is held up as being one of the few stores in the country that gets comics from America and this is true, but it is also true that they are always a few months behind. Arka Bahçe is usually up to date with its single issues from the US, and their graphic novel stocks change and replenish constantly. They have a great selection of the standard superhero books produced by Marvel and DC, but they also have books from independent publishers and other companies like Image, Dark Horse, Boom, Dynamite and IDW.
It is one of those stores where I find myself looking at the shelves and wondering how many of my internal organs I could sell and live without just to be able to fill my apartment with deluxe editions of 100 Bullets, Watchmen, Sandman, and Blankets.
They stock t-shirts and posters with geeky images on them for you to decorate your home with, though my wife has banned me from buying a giant poster of the Tardis for our living room wall. They have a good selection of toys and models featuring characters from, but not limited to, Star Wars, Captain America and Adventure Time.
It is a paradise for the geekily inclined, and I do enjoy taking friends there and watching their carefully crafted veneer of cool drop away when they see that they can buy a Spider-man wallet.
The staff are very friendly and will help you find what you’re searching for, though for me I find, with a store as well-stocked as this, the joy is in the searching.
Arka Bahçe Çizgi Roman Dükkanı is located at Sinan Paşa Mah. Ortabahçe Cad. Büyük Beşiktaş Çarşısı No:10/1 Dükkan No: 27 ve 28 Beşiktaş
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in March of 2014. It was updated for relevance on December of 2018.
