Mondo's Making More Than Posters, And It's Alienating Fans

One morning in late July, a 4LP vinyl box set of Gustavo Santolalla's score for videogame The Last Of Us went on sale. All 2,500 available copies sold out within 90 minutes. That's not unusual for Austin-based print shop and art gallery Mondo—especially for its first-ever video game soundtrack release. But what did stand out was the next thing the company tweeted: that they would immediately begin taking pre-orders for another pressing of the Last Of Us score.

Those who had managed to score one of the initial run were incensed, and wanted assurances that the first pressing would be distinguishable as such. Mondo explained the decision and delineated the new music imprints under the Mondo umbrella. But while furor died down, it still highlights the crossroads the company finds itself at, especially as it expands well past its origins and dominates the pop-culture art spotlight.

Mondo began as a t-shirt shop within Austin's Alamo Drafthouse movie theater, and eventually moved into creating posters for movies that were part of Alamo's Rolling Roadshow; more promotional tool than high-demand art, they were essentially gig posters for movies.

But as the Drafthouse itself succeeded—the theater chain has expanded to cities across the country and started a distribution company, Drafthouse Films, that earned an Oscar nomination for The Act Of Killing—so has Mondo. Gig posters grew into a sprawling collectible business for prints, records, and figures, and even an actual gallery space.

When Creative Director Mitch Putnam joined the company in 2009, Mondo was producing 20-25 posters a year. Now it creates around 200, with licenses that range from the biggest releases of the year (Jurassic World, Avengers: Age Of Ultron) to beloved classics (The Breakfast Club, Back To The Future, Star Wars). Only a few hundred of each print is produced, then then the screens are destroyed. "We've come out with a pretty hard stance," says Putnam, "we do not and will not reprint our posters. We want people to feel like they got something that they can't buy at the mall." Not surprisingly, most sell out in a single day. (That fervor for pop-culture art isn't isolated to Mondo, either: Galleries like Spoke in San Francisco and Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles specialize in artists whose work is inspired by film, television, and other media. )

When Mondo made its first forays into issuing vinyl soundtracks, it started with very small projects, like the 2012 remake of slasher film Maniac and cult Italian horror film The Beyond. There's a conscious effort to make the album art as high-quality as the prints, and to create records with special color tie-ins, like last summer's "Mixtape, Vol. 1" from Guardians Of The Galaxy on "Purple Infinity Stone" vinyl. But there's also a philosophical shift between how it approaches print production and its vinyl releases. Selling prints online makes the art accessible to people who don't necessarily feel comfortable buying expensive original works of art in a gallery space. But selling records online isn't quite the same as going into a record store, browsing the stacks, and finding something special—which is an experience Mondo and its horror-soundtrack imprint Death Waltz Recording Company value highly.

Label manager and Death Waltz founder Spencer Hickman cites his 25 years in and around the record business as a major reason behind the desire to press enough records so that it's not an online-only marketplace. "Record collectors, on the whole, still want to go to a shop," he says. Hickman also wants to keep things in print and in record stores, because "you don't want people to be excluded from going to your back catalogue and seeing where the label has come from." But he's still got a collector's mind, which drives the production of tiny limited runs, what he calls "the things that drive you crazy when you can't get them."

Instead of a strict and unwavering stance against reprinting, Mondo plays looser with the idea of repressing vinyl—a policy which comes directly from the history of record production. "This is a world in which it's not uncommon to see an eighth or ninth pressing of a record," says Putnam. "The Last Of Us score started with [an edition] number we thought made sense. That number got blown away pretty quickly, and rather than tell everyone 'too bad, go buy your copy on eBay,' we did a preorder for more copies."

But controversy aside, the Last Of Us situation points to a more complicated issue that the company hasn't necessarily anticipated: intersecting fandoms. Gamers, vinyl collectors, and art enthusiasts were all clearly interested in a highly limited vinyl soundtrack of a widely acclaimed game. But every collector community reacts differently to limited edition sizes; a second screen print edition might be sacrilege, but a second vinyl pressing is par for the course. Though Mondo has taken pains to explain that they treat record releases differently from posters and figures, it's flirting with that line, and collectors are reacting accordingly.

Custom-designed packaging makes records valuable both as playable commodity and a displayable work of art—and both of those categories have ravenous secondary markets. Making more records, or giving in to repressing, keeps with vinyl traditions, but devalues the artwork. By Putnam's own admission, "the reason everyone is so interested in this stuff is because it's so limited edition." But as the company expands beyond reviving the art of the movie poster, and gains more legitimacy as an art producer and a record label, it courts more controversy over the way it consciously limits access to in-demand items. Mondo has done work for The Amazing Spider-Man (and plenty of other Spidey stuff), so they must know Uncle Ben's adage well: with great power comes great responsibility. What's not clear is whether the company wants to accept the responsibility of a wider audience as it continues to grow even more popular.