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I’ve been to Bergen Street every week since week one, and I honestly have no idea what to do on Wednesday.

It’s such a beautiful shop and well curated shop. This is depressing news.

@Evan Meadow

Except that superheroes aren’t mainstream. If it weren’t for the cartoons, video games, and movies, most people would not care about DC and Marvel. And even then, they aren’t that relevant outside of the United States. If nothing else, showing that comics can be more than just muscled capes and can have a wide variety of stories to tell is a good thing.

I’m going to miss Bergen. Got some really nice comics there and went to one of the after parties they sponsored. It was great seeing the local artists and their works. Hope that their foray into publishing is successful.

sad news. i wonder how much more of this we’ll see going forward with rents in big cities skyrocketing and margins getting smaller and smaller.

Sounds like the Hussein Obama Economy has claimed another victim.

The amazing thing? The “non-mainstream” and “mainstream” sides of comics are equally elitist, equally obnoxious, both smug and suffering from a massive inferiority complex about what non-comic fans think of their habits.

WB, you’re right. But any store catering exclusively to just one side will never work, And that’s for both mainstream and indy. Wasn’t Bergen Street the one that proudly claimed “We’re no longer going to order any DC or Marvel books unless our customers special order them?”

Saying that sets up an automatic doomsday clock. Because no store can neither ignore the popular, just as much as if they instead chose to ignore the esoteric which can’t be ignored either.

Maggie, you’re right, but Bergen would pride itself more on having copies of anything by Daniel Clowes or Kramer’s Ergot. That store in no way looks like the place to go to get Disney, Asterix, or anything Aw Yeah! People have clearly said they were able to find comics for their children there, but you don’t walk into that place expecting that, and visual first impressions are important.

One of the best stores ever. Sad to see them go!

Evan–
With all due respect, you are incorrect. Many stores that order heavily on Marvel & DC titles also shut their doors with regularity. I’ve seen so many comic shops that fit that description disappear I’ve lost count. Also, I’m going to speculate that you didn’t shop there, and are relying on your interpretations of things you’ve read online about Bergen Street. I would hate for other stores to get the same impression, which is why I’m taking a moment to write.
It doesn’t matter if a store sells bread and milk, or comic books: no store can stock its shelves with items that regularly don’t sell, or OVER stock its shelves with stuff that sells only marginally. Simply put, Bergen Street adjusted it’s ordering to reflect what its customers were actually buying.
When you walk into a comic shop and see stacks of previous -months issues sitting there? That may look impressive when you’re a customer, but it all represents unsold stock that must be leveraged against and subtracted from what the store did manage to sell. It only makes sense to adjust the ordering to eliminate product that isn’t selling and give that shelf space to stuff customers actually want.
Most comics shops don’t carry EVERYTHING. To some extent, they’re all curating. Bergen Street absolutely carried Marvel & DC Comics as anyone who actually shopped there can attest. Many Image Comics are outselling Marvel and DC, at least in Brooklyn, and the shop reflected that. It also stocked books that have dominated the best sellers lists for years like Drama, Smile, and volumes of The Walking Dead just to name a few. There are enough massive, MASSIVE sellers outside the monthly superhero market to support a store like Bergen Street (although again, they carried that stuff too). The shop was a staple of the community and was responsive to that community’s wide tastes, which included a large all-ages section along with everything else. Beyond that, the shop did everything it could to get whatever someone walking in asked for if it wasn’t already there. Sometimes sales aren’t the only factor.

WB–Yah, that’s never a surprising and an always disappointing truth.

I was never a fan of the dark wood actually, just, well, too dark, but the staff was always friendly to me. A small curated selection for all types of comics, and what else should you be doing in a space that size? An contrary to some of this commentary, a really welcoming eye-level to tykes all-ages section. It wasn’t my regular shop, but I had pleasant times there.