AHOY Comics has announced a new deal with Lunar Distribution to distribute the publisher’s single-issue comics. The arrangement was announced by AHOY in a social media post yesterday afternoon.

The single-issue distribution deal with Lunar will be in addition to Diamond Comics’s distribution of both AHOY’s single issues and collected editions for the direct market. Earlier this year AHOY signed with Simon & Schuster in a deal to bring their collected editions into the bookstore market.

The deal is big news for Lunar, one of the two companies who opened up shop last year to distribute DC Comics following the pandemic-caused Diamond shutdown. Lunar, the sole remaining DC Comics distributor following the shuttering of Midtown Comics-run UCS at the end of 2020, is the distribution arm of Discount Comic Book Service (DCBS), the massive mail-order comics retailer.

AHOY Comics will be the third publisher Lunar distributes. In addition to exclusively distributing DC Comics, earlier this year Lunar also added Scout Comics titles to their offerings. The first single-issue title available for retailers to order from Lunar is Paul Constant and Fred Harper‘s Snelson #1, which has a final order cutoff date of this Sunday.

AHOY’s addition of Lunar as a distributor could be seen as another blow to the once-dominant Diamond Comics Distributors, who after losing DC Comics last year lost their other biggest publisher, Marvel Comics, to Penguin Random House earlier this year. Diamond’s position as a distribution monopoly took a huge hit last year during their aforementioned shutdown, which effectively brought the periodical economy of the direct market to a screeching halt at a time when retailers were already struggling due to the pandemic, and which shone a huge spotlight on Diamond’s position as a single point of failure for the traditional comics industry. Yes, AHOY’s Lunar deal is not a complete severing of ties with Diamond, but between the addition of Lunar and the deal with S&S they’re clearly setting up contingency plans in case of future Diamond calamities.

Who’ll be next?