REGIONAL REPORT : Specialty Stores Ride Popularity of Comic Books : Retailing: Today’s comic books are filled with adult preoccupations--sex, money, career--with adult-size prices for grown-up readers.

Batman worries that he’s going bonkers. The Punisher uses a shotgun to blast a bad guy at close range.

Welcome to the world of comic books, where Archie and Veronica had better keep their heads down and their shrink’s phone number handy: These days comic books are full of Angst and body counts.

The resurging popularity of comic books since the mid-1980s can be traced to several factors--notably, the shift to adult themes, the box office draw of films such as “Batman” and the nostalgic mood of many Americans. But the comic book business also has benefited in large part from the rise of a new type of specialty store to serve the market. And these shops in turn have thrived with the new comics craze.

Shops like Freedonia Funny Works--which shares a strip mall on a busy street in Orange with a travel agency, an insurance agent and an antique firearms dealer--have replaced the gradually disappearing mom-and-pop corner stores where most comics used to be sold.

In the last 10 years stores such as Freedonia have proliferated around the Southland and the nation. There are at least a dozen stores in Orange County, 30 in San Diego and more than 175 in Los Angeles. In Los Angeles alone, that’s up from a mere 15 or so stores in 1980, according to an estimate by a major distributor.

These little stores, about 5,000 of them nationwide, have become the comics publishers’ major retail outlets.

And the results have been dramatic. As recently as 1986, only about $130 million worth of comics were sold in the United States. By 1989 sales had tripled to an estimated $400 million, according to the trade publication Comic Buyer’s Guide.

It takes three of Freedonia’s walls to display the hundreds of new titles the publishers are cranking out today--just like in the heydays of the 1940s and 1950s, when comics publishers put out Westerns, detective stories and love stories for adults and comics such as “Casper the Friendly Ghost” for children.

If your tastes don’t run to comic books, owner John Koukoutsakis’ back room is crammed with one of the nation’s largest collections of posters from old movies and the original rubber mask of the “Creature from the Black Lagoon.” But comic books are the real draw. Today’s comics are filled with adult preoccupations--sex, money, career--because more often than not the buyer is an adult. And the comics, which sold for a dime in the 1940s, now have adult-sized prices: $1.50 to $2. The bigger, more expensive “graphic novels” that are all the rage cost from $8 to $10.

X-Men, a comic book about a group of mutant superheroes published since the 1960s, is probably the best-selling comic book these days. In 1980, it sold an estimated 200,000 copies a month; now sales are closer to 400,000.

That’s good, but still nowhere near the million-plus copies that Superman routinely sold in the early 1940s when comics were a relatively new form of entertainment and didn’t have to compete with television or Nintendo games.

Still, the growth has been steady enough to have attracted the attention of some big-time participants: DC, the smaller of the two publishers that dominate the market, is owned by the huge media conglomerate Time Warner. (DC publishes Superman and Batman.) And last year, Revlon Chairman Ronald O. Perelman acquired Marvel, the largest comic-book publisher, for an undisclosed sum. (Marvel publishes Spiderman and X-Men.)

Marvel and DC are the only survivors from the 1940s, when there were as many as 50 comic-book publishers. The industry went through two slumps in the last 50 years and hasn’t yet fully recovered. In the 1950s, comics publishers began to lose their adult readers as servicemen returned home to start families and TV lured away other readers. Trying to hold their audience, publishers turned to the horror and true-crime genre. But, in 1954, a Senate subcommittee decided that the lurid little books contributed to juvenile delinquency, and comics were forced to excise the gore.

The hearings reinforced another idea: that comic books were a children’s medium.

“There’s still a taint,” says Bill Liebowitz, owner of three Golden Apple comic book stores in Los Angeles. “The man on the street thinks it’s only kids who can’t read novels that read comic books today.”

In fact, comic-book buyers tend to be at least moderately affluent and educated. Some are prosperous business and professional people in their 40s and 50s, store owners say. But one thing holds constant: Readers are overwhelmingly male, by some estimates as much as 90%.

The people who own the shops tend also to be male, hip, thirtyish types who started out collecting comics and understand their customers.

Most comics stores are in strip malls and other low-rent retail locations. But more dealers are moving into higher-visibility locations such as large shopping malls.

And the comics have gradually changed too. Marvel, which had been an insignificant force in the industry, in the 1960s began creating new-age superheroes with human problems: Spiderman, for instance, never seemed to have enough money and couldn’t get a date.

But the industry really got a boost when it adopted a new distribution system in the mid-1970s. Comics were selling so poorly that the big distributors didn’t want to handle them anymore. So shop owners began to deal directly with publishers. In return for a bigger discount, shops gave up the right to return unsold copies for a refund. Now most comics stores operate on this “direct sales” basis.

The comic dealer who’s savvy about ordering from among the nearly 500 different titles available each month can turn a tidy profit, since the markup on the average comic book is 100%.