Funko and Mondo on Their Approach to Exclusives, Outside the Box Releases, and Revamping Their SDCC Booth
From celebrating the 15th anniversary of Pop! with a retro Batman to honoring Jaws' 50th anniversary with a bold new packaging approach.
As Mondo’s Peter Santa-Maria put it, when we spoke recently during San Diego Comic-Con, “Being here at Comic-Con is, for us, the whole year's work.” He evoked The Fantastic Four: First Steps, remarking, “It's like that scene of The Thing pulling the boat. That's what we feel all year. It’s like, okay, ‘We're gonna get to Comic-Con!’”
Mondo is part of parent company Funko’s ever-impressive mega-”booth” at SDCC, which includes multiple sections for their different brands. One thing that stood out about the entire Funko area this year — including sections devoted to Mondo, Loungefly and Bitty — was that while it was using the same large amount of floor space as before, there was, well, more space. As in things weren’t quite as tightly packed together.
As it turned out, that had to do with realizing just how congested things had gotten in the past, with Funko’s Jason Bischoff telling me, “Function inspires form, so we had to increase the brim of our sidewalks to accommodate all of the demand and people. It's been kind of a learning [curve] over the last couple years. As much as it has been fun to set up Funkoville, there's a lot of people over in our neighborhood, and so we just want to make sure that everybody's got a little bit more room to breathe.”
Regarding the sections for each of their brands, Bischoff explained, “With Mondo and with Loungefly and with Funko, everybody's kind of chasing their own elevations this year. So Mondo, it's a bit more like Mondo kitch; red and black. It's a full museum display. Loungefly is very much of the Gucci of geek. You know, you've got these Tiffany turquoises and gold, champagne gold fixtures.”
As for the central display and store for Funko itself, Bischoff noted it was, “Mary Blair-inspired design celebrating San Diego. We owe so much to San Diego,” adding that they’d filled the art with Easter eggs both to San Diego itself and Funko.
A very notable difference for Mondo’s section this year was that it was not walled in any longer, with a much more accessible, open feel for the museum-type area Bischoff mentioned, versus the previous need to first line up outside to see what they were displaying. Said Santa-Maria, “This booth is insane. Nolan Fleming designed the whole booth. His vision for our merch, our shirts, our pins, it's Nolan. Right when you walk into the booth, you're already getting one of our artists and their work. So then every single piece inside — the figures, the posters, the records — everyone's showing off something, and we're just proud to be here among it all.”
Mondo’s Hector Arce explained, “We've been wanting this layout for years. At Comic-Con, it's always been very difficult to get something like this for us. But this year, finally, we have this open space. It's super inviting. It's very gallery forward, in a sense, where you can appreciate everything that we've done.” Plus, the actual purchase line was outside the display area, not intertwined with those browsing, meaning, “This area can be a nice communal area for all of us to hang out and admire what we've done.”
THE DARK KNIGHT POP! RETURNS
2025 marks a notable milestone for Funko, because it’s the 15th anniversary of the debut of their Pop! vinyl figures, the product that would become their most popular and ubiquitous. And as it happens, the beginnings of Pop! go back to San Diego Comic-Con, because in 2010, the line began with four SDCC exclusives for what was then called the Funko Force 2.0 line. All of those first releases were DC Comics characters, most notably two variations for Batman. And to mark this big anniversary, for SDCC 2025, a new version of that first Batman Pop! was recreated, along with Robin and Penguin, complete with the original clamshell packaging Pops were first released in.
Said Bischoff, “Those 15th anniversary Pops…. I remember being in my local comic store 15 years ago seeing the Funko Force figures for the first time in the original clamshell. We wanted to honor that history. Our fungineers had come up with a perfect recreation of what you remember, but properly Funko Pop! branded, and it has the brand new authentication stickers on it and everything. It should kind of poke you right in that nostalgia heart if you've been with us for a long time.”
Bischoff said they instantly knew they had to use that throwback packaging, remarking, “It's all about fans, right? So what would fans want most if we're doing these anniversary items? It's all about that celebration. We knew fans wanted the clam shell, so we went all out and figured it out.”
MARVELOUS SAVAGE LAND AND GODZILLA RELEASES
Comic-Con exclusives can take a long time to formulate, and Arce told me the idea of doing a Savage Land Rogue figure for their popular X-Men animated line for SDCC 2025 was one he first thought of last year. He added that the question then became “Let's see if they'll let us do it first” - “They’ll” in this case being Marvel.
However, Santa-Maria said, “The Marvel people are awesome to work with… They're the kindest dudes. They know that we're trying to do weird shit and they're always like, ‘Yes, go do it. Do it!’” All of which resulted in a quick greenlight for this variation of Rogue.
Another notable SDCC release for Mondo involved Marvel but also stood out because it involved a second powerhouse outside company as well - Toho, owners of Godzilla, for a print recreating the cover for Marvel’s 1970s Godzilla comic book. This poster was created on the heels of a recent new partnership between Marvel and Toho leading to those old comics finally being reprinted for the first time in decades, along with the publication of new crossovers.
For Santa-Maria, getting to do that print was personally exciting. As he explained, “It's a trip, dude. I don't know about you, but for me, that was one of my first exposures to Godzilla” - something I told him was indeed the case for myself thanks to my early love of all things Marvel. Replied Santa-Maria, “The cover is so iconic, not just because it's a number one but for that very reason, because that's one of my first memories of Godzilla.”
As for how it came about, he explained, “Toho said, Hey, we're bringing it back: We're opening the vault to the Marvel Godzilla. Do you guys want to do it? We're like ‘Sign us up! Let's have a full screen print treatment!’ Our amazing technician, Jon Smith, painstakingly separates all the colors. So when you get that in hand, it's not a poster. It's an art print.’”
Santa-Maria got to offer up his own artistic take on Godzilla as well this year with the SDCC exclusive All Monsters Attack Linocut Poster he created, based on Toho’s 1969 Godzilla and company movie.
SURPRISING INCLUSIONS
Funko and Mondo make products based around some of the biggest franchises going, which this year resulted in of the moment SDCC exclusives for both The Fantastic Four: First Steps and Superman, including a First Steps H.E.R.B.I.E. Funko Pop! and a Loungefly backpack. For Superman, there was also a Loungefly backpack, plus two different Mondo posters tied to the James Gunn film.
But amongst those massive modern titles, they’ll also frequently throw in some fun, often unexpected retro releases, which was the case among the SDCC exclusives this year. For Funko, that included a the Pop! Rides Deluxe Tank Girl with Tank release, marking the first time the British comic book series turned 1990s movie got a Pop! release.
Bischoff said the company always wants to keep in mind that “everyone's a fan of something, and so we want to be mindful that [there are] fans that have been with us since the beginning, and fans that are meeting us for the first time here on the show floor. Everybody's looking for something a little bit different, and that little different is really what will be the catalyst for them to discover the greater neighborhood of Funko friends, right? So maybe it starts with something like a Tank Girl; something unexpected. And then it quickly falls into a Jason Voorhees or a Marty McFly. it's all your favorite stuff in the same size, scale and stylization, and so, you know, you really are literally building that neighborhood of your dreams. It's got to start somewhere. So we're constantly pushing the boundaries.”
While Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is obviously a beloved movie, it still stood out to see the 1970s Gene Wilder classic get a great new poster at SDCC from Mondo, since while it’s not the first time ever they’ve tackled that film, it’s not one we’d assume there might be a new release for. However, Santa-Maria said he felt that those type of surprise releases “are the history of Mondo. Nothing gets done if someone's not a huge fan, right? And someone on our team goes, 'We should do Willy Wonka! We got him. We have the rights to do it. Let's do it.’ And then reaching out to [artist] Julian Tedesco, which is like... I mean, the guy's a master.”
Said Santa-Maria, of Tedesco’s poster, “It feels contemporary and classic at the same time. It could have been an amazing book cover of a paperback back then, or it could just be brand new art that fits with today's aesthetic.” (I’m inclined to agree, since I ended up going home with one of these because I loved it so much)
Arce said once they knew they were doing a new Willy Wonka poster, they got extra excited to come up with “the whole fun thing with the random pull of the golden version.” This referred to the fact that five lucky people purchasing the poster received a golden version limited to just those five prints, in a nod to the original story’s five golden tickets.
YOU SPIN ME RIGHT ROUND, BRUCEY, RIGHT ROUND
Besides posters, toys, and other collectibles, Mondo also makes records, of course, had some at SDCC, including exclusive editions of World of Warcraft: 20 Years of Music, Coraline - 15th Anniversary, and Flow - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Regarding how much an outside company comes to them about collaborating versus them pursing a title, Mondo’s Record Label Manager, Cameron Dean, explained, “It's kind of a 50/50 mix of us asking ‘We really want to do this thing. Can you please, please, please, let us do it?’ And then other times the studios think of us, and they're like, ‘Mondo would handle this really well.’”
Said Dean, “We build up those relationships with the studios, the record labels that own the music, the composers, directors… It’s really a long game of working with the people, or trying to work with the people directly, that you want to work with. And having them come to us being like, ‘Hey, we’ve got this coming in the pipeline. Do you want to handle physical for it?’”
Amongst the SDCC records, arguably none was as notable as a special gold variant of their recent Jaws - 50th Anniversary soundtrack, which boasts a pop up inner jacket that reveals a shark fin and allows you to display the album standing up on its own. In the case of this special 50th Anniversary release, Dean noted, “It kind of came to us by accident. We released a version [of the soundtrack] with Universal five or six years ago. And [for 2024] we were thinking, ‘Hey, we want to repress that.’”
Dean said it was then pointed out, “‘Wait, next year is the 50th! We should hold on!’ And then, as we were talking more and more about it, it became something really big that we weren't anticipating it to be right off the bat.’
The project became even bigger due to another example of serendipity, with Dean explaining, “Then Alan Hynes, the artist who handled the design and artwork for the release, came to us asking, ‘Hey. you guys still have the rights to Jaws? I want to do something for the 50th!’ And we told him, 'Actually, yes!' And he came to us with a concept and a prototype of the pop up and we're like, ‘Holy shit, this is cool!’”
Remarked Arce, “I've never seen another record jacket like that acts as its own display. It’s really kind of revolutionary.”