ComicsPRO released the results of its 2025 Retailer Sentiment Survey on October 24. The survey was done from September 28 to October 20, later than the usual June-July dates because of the Diamond bankruptcy. “We felt that during June and July, retailers wouldn’t give accurate perspectives or have accurate feelings about how they felt about PRH and Lunar, because both companies had to pick up a lot of the slack,” Executive Director Marco Davanzo explained.
Penguin Random House Publisher Services (PRHPS) got a higher overall score, and Lunar Distribution a lower one, than in 2024, when they were essentially tied (see “Retailers Grade Diamond, Lunar, PRHPS”). ComicsPRO has been doing this survey since 2022, and over time, PRHPS has improved in almost all categories while Lunar’s scores declined in about half.
Retailers assigned each distributor a score from 1 to 5 in a variety of categories. Lunar scored highest in minimizing damages to comics and graphic novels and ease of making payments, but in all three categories, their 2025 scores were lower than 2024. PRHPS, on the other hand, improved in all three.
The biggest shift was in point-of-sale (POS) integration with their data; PRHPS moved up by half a point while Lunar declined by about the same amount.
PRHPS also got better grades for customer service, sales/marketing support, ease of damage reporting, ease of ordering, selection of items to order, and time and ability to replenish. PRHPS has been steadily improving its ordering platform and surpassed Lunar, which has been improving but more slowly.
Overall, the responses over the past four years show a trend of continuous improvement on PRHPS’s part, while Lunar has been less consistent; in fact, retailers gave Lunar a lower overall score this year than in any of the past four years.
Source: ICV2
