by Kako

24 inches by 36 inches, edition of 120

AUSTIN, Texas – Outside a nondescript building a mile or so north of the University of Texas campus, self-described poster addicts stood in the rain Saturday, anxious to get a fix of their exotic vice.

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"We're poster nerds," said Sam Cardozo, a collector who lives in Austin and stood at the front of the line with a handful of out-of-town friends, waiting to get into opening night at The Mondo Gallery.

Cardozo, who said he owns between 500 and 600 posters, queued up around noon Friday with his fellow paper-and-ink fiends, some of whom had driven from Denver after receiving a cryptic announcement about some sort of Mondo event. Dozens of others braved the unnaturally soggy spring weather, some having traveledfrom as far as Southern California.

Chase Tatum and three friends made the 16-hour drive from Colorado, only to stand for 30 more hours in front of the new gallery, which was filled with who knew what. "We're here to buy," Tatum said.

They would soon find out that the Mondo Gallery's walls were covered with 38 pieces of imaginative sci-fi artwork (see some of them, along with photos of the Mondo team, in the gallery above). Some pieces were rare originals, like a painting by movie poster legend Drew Struzan or Jason Edmiston's riveting acrylic-on-wood The Hand of Ming, while others were screen-printed posters from Mondo's vaults, created by artists like Olly Moss and Tyler Stout.

The new digs will serve as a base of operations for Mondo, an expanding