50 Years of Chicago Comics

I attended all of the Chicago Comicons! Back in the mid-1970s the earliest of those Chicago Comicons were sponsored/hosted by Joe Sarno and Larry Charet and Bob Weinberg. All three were purveyors of comics and fiction and nostalgia in their separate shops in Chicagoland, and in fact Joe's Nostalgia Shop (later Comic Kingdom) was my weekly go-to from the early 1970s until he closed up shop circa 2000. 

Out in the suburbs, Gary Colabuono opened his first Moondog's Comics in the late 1970s and his empire grew to about nine different retail locations by the early 1990s.

Larry's Comic Book Store opened in Chicago in 1972 and, to celebrate the 50 years, Gary hosted a dinner party last month for Larry and a few select others including Mike Gold at Gibson's Steak House in Rosemont. Jim Wisniewski drew the accompanying poster to commemorate the occasion.

Larry still sells comics online where his ebay name is scifispy