Lunar Distribution's Christina Merkler talks about modern comics distro and the bright future she sees for the industry

Christina Merkler is a busy woman.

As if being the co-owner DCBS and InStockTrades wasn’t enough to keep her busy, in 2020, Merkler also became co-owner of Lunar Distribution — a newly-created company that signaled the biggest change to comic book distribution in more than two decades. Three years later, Merkler and Lunar alike are, if anything, even busier as Lunar continues to grow, with more publishers signing up.

Merkler and the Lunar team were part of the professional programming track of Emerald City Comic Con 2023, presenting the retailer breakfast on Thursday morning. Popverse took the opportunity to sit down with one of the most important figures in the comic book industry — not that she’d believe any such description herself — to talk about… well, everything.

Popverse: How did Lunar get started? I mean, I know that DC came to DCBS during the pandemic, when Diamond had shut down, and essentially asked, 'We want to keep publishing comics, can you help?'

Christina Merkler: Yeah. 'We want to keep publishing comics!' For any of the stores that were out there that are still open — and [DCBS] was one of them, because Indiana didn't shut down at all — how can we get comics to those stores because we want to continue to provide them?

Once they came to us, we were like, 'Yeah, okay. We'll just build this quick system.' It was a bare-bones thing, but you have to do the things that we never had to consider before. You have to get resale certificates from stores and you have to make sure that you have proper addresses and they're all commercial addresses, because we’d always dealt with residential. All of those little things. But really, generally speaking, it was as flawless as it could have been, creating a distribution company in three weeks.

How much of Lunar was, essentially, just a scaling up at what was already being done at DCBS? Because to a degree, some of the mechanics are similar, but on a different scale.

No, it was almost exactly that. In fact, it was easier, because all I had to do was books.

And it's funny, because in the beginning, we had Lunar and we had all of five employees, right? There would be weeks where it'd be bigger and we'd have to pull a couple of DCBS employees to help us out. And they were like, 'Oh, we like this way better!' Lunar would help DCBS out when they were slow, and they hated DCBS. When you add toys and apparel and posters and prints and pins, some people are just like, 'No, I like knowing exactly what to expect with books...' The team is so well-trained now that, if anything odd-shaped comes out, there's a plan that's made before you even hit