Fat Jack’s Comicrypt has been evicted from its Center City location. The iconic comic shop will close after 48 years.

Center City’s oldest comic book shop, Fat Jack’s Comicrypt, is closing after nearly 50 years of business.

Mike Ferrero, 72, Fat Jack’s owner, said the shop’s landlord had taped an eviction notice to the window of the Sansom Street store earlier this week.

“It was month-to-month. We’re at the point where they want us out,” said Ferrero during a phone interview Wednesday.

Ferrero, who opened the shop in 1976 in a storefront near 20th and Walnut, said he has struggled to pay rent and other mounting store debts since the pandemic. He is unsure if he will be able to open in another Center City location (although the store’s Oaklyn, N.J., location will remain open, he said).

“We’re looking to see what we can find,” he said. “But Center City may have outpriced us. Hopefully, it’s not the end of an era.”

The comic shop has until May 29 to leave the spot that has been its home since 1988. Everything in the store, except newly released comics, is now 70% off. Fat Jack’s will ship weekly subscriber orders through June.

“We’re trying to move whatever we can,” Ferrero said.

The closure of the iconic shop leaves a hole in Philly’s vibrant comic book scene. Known as Philly’s first comic shop, Fat Jack’s had survived multiple recessions, decades of the ups and downs of the comic book industry, and the rise of online comic sellers. But it could not climb out of the pit it fell into during the pandemic, when the shutdown and remote work decimated its walk-in traffic, Ferrero said.

Last year, Fat Jack’s longtime manager, Eric Partridge, who was laid off this week, organized a GoFundMe campaign to help the shop raise money. At the time, the shop owed $80,000 to its distributors. The effort, which raised nearly $24,000, kept the store afloat, but could not save it.

“It bought us time,” Ferrero said. “We appreciate everything everyone has done for us.”

On Wednesday, the day new comics are released each week, the shop was busy with customers who had come to share after hearing the bad news.

Manager Henry Stanley, who has worked at the shop for three years, said he has been ringing up discounted comics by the box load since word got out online about the closing. The shop had tried to adapt in recent years, he said. But the comic book sales they made on eBay and other online sites were not enough.

“We have been struggling to survive in post-COVID Philly, man,” he said.

Many customers bought all they could carry, picking through the shop’s boxes of back issues and quickly thinning bookshelves.

Tariem Burroughs, 43, director of career services and experiential learning at Drexel University, said he had been to the shop twice since hearing it would be closing. He has been going to Fat Jack’s since he was 12, he said. And while he can buy his comics elsewhere, he said he will miss the weekly routine of coming in for the latest books and lingering to talk with the staff and other customers.

“It’s a hole,” he said. “It will be very weird not having this here.”