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 the pick line on how that's going to be packed. Once we scaled up and knew Lunar was moving forward as a full distribution company, we made a conscious decision to make the companies absolutely separate.

Was there nervousness on your part?

Oh, we were terrified. We were terrified that the scale was going to go so fast that we weren't going to be able to handle it. And it did — it went from 180 customers to 1000 within a couple of months, and then it doubled again, but then we realized we just have to staff up. We have the bones in place, we know how to package the boxes. We have the ability to create these shipments. And that's really the base level that is what we needed to be able to get them to stores.

You said at the ECCC 2023 retailer breakfast, and this was the money line for me, “In a few years, people are going to realize that DC saved the direct market.”

Yeah.

You also were talking about things that you want to change about the direct market: You were talking about the need for new readers, the need to market books differently, market stores differently. How much do you feel like you are leading this charge? Because with the placement that you have, you are a major player now.

I never think of myself in that way. It's so funny. [Laughs]

I hate to tell you, you're in charge of one of the largest distributors out there.

I am, but we're always so busy working, that it's hard to see the scale or the impact that you have sometimes. I think the charge has to be led by someone, and I feel like I have enough time in that I can finally just say, 'Look guys, it’s not working…!' I'm tired of everyone just saying the direct market is broken and then just leaving it at that, right? We actually have to figure out how to unbreak it. How to fix it. How to correct whatever it is that needs to happen.

Everyone says, 'Oh, we need to grow the readership. We need to grow the readership.' But no one ever actually says, 'How do we grow the readership?' I'm not saying that I have all the answers, but I do think that sometimes, the direct market is its own worst enemy, and it's almost preventing itself from growing. It's not almost, it is.

I mean, there are multiple retailers who are really doing an amazing job of growing their business. When I talked to Tessa at Cloud City Comics yesterday, I wanted to kiss her. She knows how to do it. She's figured it out. And it's not necessarily going to work for everybody.

No, but she knows what works for her store.

Exactly. She has a diverse staff. She makes sure that she has the most welcoming store that people want to come into. She also has the knowledge base to make sure that she's bringing in the right product mix for her customers. And then she said she's already opening a third store. I love hearing that because that means she's figured out she's doing it right.

It may not work in Podunk, wherever, but I think that all retailers have to realize, 'Okay, is this the best me? Am I putting my best foot forward?' Some people are really great about being parts of the community and some people aren't. And that's fine as well. We all have our choices, whether we want to make a lot of money, whether we want to have a great, loyal customer base. I mean, you have the choice to make all of those things happen. And really, no one is stopping you other than yourself from doing it.

One of the things you were talking about as well during the presentation is the idea of a retailer changing. You made the point that so many retailers are not storefronts anymore, and that's important because when publishers are thinking about promotional material, an online store can't do anything with posters. Do you have any idea what the percentage would be?

You know what? I haven't pulled that yet. And I know it's just a matter of asking for a report in my system to tell me how many. I was kind of surprised... I did some sort of report for DC because we went and did our yearly wrap-up with them at the end of January. And it was for all the news stores. So when I did that in the breakfast, we opened, I think, 212 new stores. 177 are currently still active.

And when you say new stores, that's a new account?

Yes. If we have somebody who has an account and they add another store that's in that as well. When we do that, we know whether it's brick and mortar, dedicated website. And so I did break that down for DC. But it was a large percentage of brick and mortars. What we did see was an increase in dedicated websites. If I saw eBay stores, because they are, through DC's policy, an eBay store as long as it's not an auctions site and it is a store, that is eligible to have an account. I found that those stores tended to open and they were a little easier to close. Not surprising. They didn't have as much skin in the game. So I think that if a brick and mortar retailer's concerned, I don't think they really need to be because they still have the upper hand.

With eBay, you're in the ethernet, or you're in this gigantic pool of people who are also trying to sell on eBay, in addition to brick and mortar stores and websites and lots of other stores. So it's not easy for you to set yourself apart in that space. It's much easier in your own space in a brick and mortar.

Every exposure that anyone outside of your current customer base gets is only going to help you. It's never going to hurt you. I think that's always been the issue with people saying, "Well, I don't want this in Target,” is that Target is never going to carry the collection that you carry in your store or have the ability to carry in your store. Target doesn't have people who can tell people the things they should be reading or help them to find the things they should be reading. That is where you win. Because Target can put volume one of Walking Dead and volume one of Batman and volume one of all of these other things. They're not going to carry 2, 3, 4 through 12. That's where you come in. And guess what? You have the ability to sell them way more than Target ever did.

That, I think, is the key. I think a lot of people in the direct market have always been like, "No, no, no. This is precious to us. We are the key." We are the key, but we also have more capability than any of those other stores. We can use them.

It does feel like you're sort of saying that, for want of a better way of putting it, the mainstream bulk stores can be the feeder markets for the direct market.

Oh, absolutely. And I know that many retailers don't like that idea, but we have to realize that there are times when no one is ever going to come into our store. So, either be okay with somebody, hopefully, feeding you those people, or, at least they're buying it and they're keeping a publisher healthy.

I mean as a distributor, I need to give you the opportunity to order these books, communicate with you effectively so that you are ordering them and have all of the right information to make sure you order them properly and have what you need, get them to you in an accurate and timely manner in great condition. That's really the sole purpose of the distributor.

But if the distributor's actual accounts aren't healthy, then the distributor has to do more. And I'm not saying they're that they're not healthy. What I mean is, if you want to grow those markets, you have to be a partner with them to help them grow that market.

We're the go-between between the publisher and the retailer. The publishers are very open to listening to retailers. It's not a problem. But it's good for us to be able to pull all that data. If the publisher's getting things from 2000 different accounts, which generally they're not, it's maybe 50 to a 100 accounts that they're getting information from. But if we can get more information from the 2000, we can give them better information to help better market to the consumer. And they should be marketing what they actually are providing, and then the retailer should be marketing and saying, "Hey, we have this."

So they have very different roles that are going to bring out, hopefully, the same result. We want to help our retailers to allow people to know they're out there. But we also think it's important for these retailers to partner with libraries, partner with schools, and try just more general eyes on their entire organization and how they want to be a part of the community. And by doing that, you'll be able to grow your business.

You were talking about adding toys, adding other products. Your were also saying you really want to get manga. Where are you aiming? What are you looking at?

I mean, I'd love to get Kodansha. I would've loved to have gotten VIZ. I am starting talks with Kodansha. And talks as in, 'Hey, can I buy books from you? Can I get some books from you?' It's funny when retailers will say... I'm not kidding you, just this week we had three more emails from three different customers saying, 'Please get as many publishers as you can because we're so happy with you. Just get all the publishers.' And we're like, 'Well, that's a little easier said than done.'

Is this fun? You're, what? Two years into it now, I guess?

Yeah. It'll be three in April. Oh, it's fun. It's fun. I know that it probably doesn't sound like it's fun. Cameron and I have always been the SpongeBobs of anywhere we were, right?

Okay, unpack that. What's that mean?

So, you know how SpongeBob's like, "I'm ready! I'm ready!"? He's always been the best. He was employee of the month for 72 months in a row. That's how we were, everywhere we were. We started in department store sales. I was literally employee the month three times in a year. And then finally, the store manager was like, "You can't be up more than three times." That's just how we were. Now that we have Lunar, we want to be number one. That is our goal. And so to us, it's this challenge. And the challenge is being the best.

It's not being the biggest necessarily. Because there's a difference between being number one and being the biggest. We want to be number one. We want, when someone says, "Who's the best distributor you get your comics from?" We want it to be Lunar. Hands down. And so, whatever we have to do to make that happen, within reason, clearly. We're not doing anything illegal, we’re not selling DCBS. We're not doing the things that maybe some people will be like, "Well, if you did this..." No.

What we're going to do is make sure that our customers are getting such great service that they can't say anything. They literally have nothing. As [retailers] said to us yesterday, 'We have nothing to complain about." That's what I want.

If you want a quick primer as to what's been happening with comic book distribution in the last few years, we have you covered.