TURKEY'S LEADING PUBLISHER OF AMERICAN SUPERHERO COMICS
Kocao�lu was a comics fan running a shop named Gerekli �eyler (Needful Things) selling imported American comics as well as frp material and the like. In 1995, he began publishing Batman from his own B�y�k Mavi Yay�nc�l�k (Big Blue Publications) label. The novelty of B�y�k 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, Kocao�lu's efforts had apparently left an impression and when one of Turkey's media giants, Medi Grup, launched a comics line in 1996, Kocao�lu was appointed to run it. Sadly, that experiment lasted even shorter.
Nothing was heard from Kocao�lu until June 1998 when a new series of Spider-Man hit the news stands. Kocao�lu had established a new comics line named Arkabah�e Yay�nc�l�k (Backgarden Publications). The sales of Spider-Man must have been promising enough this time to encourage Kocao�lu 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 Kocao�lu for a second period until Arkabah�e began to continue Spider-Man in 2002 from where it had left. In the summer of 2002, Arkabah�e 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 B�y�k Mavi's). Other titles eventually put out by Arkabah�e were Daredevil and Hulk, the former in its Turkish debut. In 2003, Arkabah�e 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) Kocao�lu 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 Kocao�lu had first started with Batman. Meanwhile, Arkabah�e had also began to experiment with publishing comics books such as Sandman. Publishing comics books for bookshops (a trend pursued by Maceraperest �izgiler since 1999) rather than monthly comics magazines for newsstands seemed a safer bet and in 2004, Arkabah�e ceased all its monthly titles. Some of the comics books published by Arkabah�e since then include G�nah �ehri (Sin City).