/Film Interview: Mondo’s Justin Ishmael Talks Comic-Con Releases, Teases Future Events, Studio Ghibli And Back To The Future
Every poster has a story. But in the case ofMondo, sometimes they release so many posters, we never really get to hear much about them.
Mondo was out in force atSan Diego Comic-Con, releasing almost two dozen brand-new posters (including variants) over the course of four days. So when I got a chance to sat down with creative directorJustin Ishmael, I decided to learn a bit more about the creation of some of those posters such asMartin Ansin’sConan the Barbarian,Ash Thorpe’sPacific RimandWilliam Stout’sKing Kong. Then, of course, we got around to talking about how the poster game itself is changing, their exciting relationship withStudio Ghibli, the likely location of the nextMondo Mystery Movie(along with a tease of the film),Back to the Future, Jurassic Park, new records…and toy prints?
Check out the full interview below.
/Film:Here at Comic-Con we see you haveAliens,Terminator, do you have a new license you’d like to tell us about?
Ash Thorpe is great. I have not met him in person. I’ll meet him at the signing, but he does unbelievable work. I think he’s… He’s never done a screen print before. Like thePacific Rimsones were his second, because he did Predator first, but I mean…
He does titles and stuff, right?
There are a couple of new artists from Comic Con, right? Killian Eng and William Stout?
Oh yeah, that’s right.
It was online this morning.
I don’t know, I just saw the image.
One thing that’s funny, we didn’t even know this, we get emails through the website and I don’t look at those… our employees handle all of those, and I guess it slipped through because I looked on my email and a year ago he had emailed the site saying like “Hey, I’m a big fan. I would love to work with you.” So when I emailed him, he was like “I emailed you!” I was like “Oh shit, I didn’t even know.” So that was funny, but I’m super glad to be working with him. I want to say that’s the last new guy that we work with, but I love debuting guys at bigger things like this and to have Ash there where people can come by and see him… I think a lot of people too with Martin, like they haven’t met him. If they weren’t at the Phone Booth Gallery show, they haven’t met him before and so many people travel to Comic Con for that…
[Ken] Taylor’s piece, when I heard that was coming, I was like “Oh, it’s going to be a companion piece to hisother Alien posters,” but it’s totally different. When you guys were talking to him about it, did he want to do something similar..then again, I guess he has also evolved a lot since then.
For the first movie he did Egg, which is very simple and…
Right. So onto Ansin’sConan the Barbarian. Finally! Itwas two years ago when you guys were hereand you first had the sticker that was like “Hey, Conan is coming from Martin Ansin” and two years later, here it is. What was the hold up there?
[Editor’s note: It wasElysium.Check it out here.]
But with the Conan it was like “Because we did the sticker and because everyone’s asked over the last couple of years when it’s happening,” it was like “Okay, let’s do Conan.” So we did Conan. It wasn’t the sticker image, it was… obviously people have seen the poster, but… we are going to have shirts with that Conan image on the shirt that people can buy too. That will be there.
What can you tell me about theTyler StoutStudio Ghiblialbum?
The movies areMy Neighbor the Yamadas, The Cat Returns, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving CastleandPrincess Mononoke. Those are the movies represented. So we decided to do three different versions of the record…. Then what makes them really different is the vinyl we do inside ties together… the colors… It’s a dual LP thing and one record will be blue, one record will be red in this package and then the next package this one will be yellow and this one will be green and this one blue and that purple or whatever the colors are. That’s happening and then we are doing shirts of those, which Ghibli told me that Disney, I think one of the Disney theme parks are the only other ones that get to sell Ghibli shirts, so it’d be us and whoever else at Disney, but it’s not very many people in the US.
It’s fun to have them trust us and like us enough to do this type of thing. I hope it does well, because the idea is if this one sells, we will be doing more of the straight “Here’s the Totoro soundtrack,” “here’s the Spirited Away soundtrack” instead of the compilation thing. I think this is a great one too, because it’s a great starter place for people that maybe don’t know what the movies are. We’ve been doing it almost a year now with Olly’s posters, to have this come out and maybe people are…
Already interested…
Do you think we will see any of that stuff on posters?
Crazy. Changing gears a bit, this is something I always think when I look at the your posters. “Oh cool, a new Mondo poster. Shit another 24 x 36, where am I going to put that?” Obviously that’s the standard size, but is size usually the artist’s choice? There used to be a lot of 18 x 24s and then now it’s getting progressively bigger.
Back in the day you guys released a poster a month and now we are doing like four posters a week. Do you worry about putting out too much stuff or maybe slowing it down?
Speaking of a movie every week, there’s a movie that comes out in a couple of weeks calledThe World’s End. You guys have done a lot of Edgar Wright stuff before and while I was in London I may or may not have been talking to Edgar Wright… Are you going to do some Edgar Wright things?
That’s true.
And [Edgar] knows it. So more than one poster tied to the movie?
[Editor’s Note: That one poster has been revealed.Shaun of the Deadby Tyler Stout.]
Okay. Are there any moreBack to the Futureposters?
There was a rumor going around last year or earlier this year about aJurassic Parkgallery show.
All right, what aboutMystery movies?
Yeah. People are going to love the records.
That’s a good tease, I like that. I don’t know how much you’ve been walking around on the floor, but this is the first year we’re seeing Mondo posters sold at other booths marked up. Did you guys see that? It’s inevitable. People buy toys and flip them. Have you noticed that?
Yeah, I think that’s the booth I saw too.
Any other cool licenses you can tease or anything you’ve got coming up? Give me like a cool, 2013, rest of the year tease besides the mystery movie.
I’m hoping October is fun, like the record stuff is so bright, like we are about to sign a pretty big multi-title deal. I’m really hoping that goes through, because that will basically seal up next year too where we will have 2013 down and 2014 record-wise. I’m hoping to have a big release in November of one that I know people will be freaking out about. We are working on getting some stuff that has never been released and it’s super difficult to get done. What else are we doing? We are going back to Leads and Thought Bubble. It’s not really London, but we’re going back to the UK and we will be doing… It’s not going to be a show, but we’re going to have a table there this year. It’s not going to be a table where we are sitting there the entire time, I think it’s almost like a pop up type thing. The idea is to do stuff with the artists that are there and if you go to the Though Bubble site and look at the artists that are there, it’s pretty major. There’s a lot of huge working artists that prefer comic books, so seeing these guys is like “Oh… Put us in touch, we’ll see if we can make something work.” I’m hoping that that actually happens, because that would be awesome.
All right, cool. I guess last thing real quick is videogames. Are we going to get into videogame prints? I thought that was something you were talking about for a while.
