REGIONAL REPORT : Specialty Stores Punching Up Comics Sales : Retailers are striving to shed the pulp book stereotypes and are cashing in on the superhero craze fed by films and the emergence of modern, adult themes in story lines.

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 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 has also benefited in large part by 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 is 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 that publishers are cranking out today--just like the heydays of the 1940s and 1950s when comics publishers put out Westerns, detective stories and love stories for adults, and comics like “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 with all-black casts and titles like “Sunday Sinners.” And then there’s the original rubber mask of the “Creature From the Black Lagoon” that comes complete with a letter verifying its authenticity.

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 now have adult-sized prices: The old dime comic books of the 1940s now cost $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.

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 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 days in the 1940s when there were up to 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; catching, some say, the mood of a nation coming to terms with the even bigger horror of the atomic bomb. 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 up to 90%.

The people who own the shops tend also to be male, hip, thirtyish types who started out collecting comics and understand their customers, which is important since most people unfamiliar with comic books regard them as a medium favored by people who move their lips when they read.

Koukoutsakis, for example, looks like many of his customers. He is clad in jeans and a cable knit sweater and wears his graying wavy hair moderately long. And he knows comics. As a teen-ager in the 1960s in La Mirada, he paid $107 for two dozen 1940s comic books; among them was a first issue of Donald Duck, which he later sold to a collector for $100.

“A lot of introverted people collect comics,” says Koukoutsakis, 35, “and if you don’t treat them like scum, you can do pretty well.”

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, a long way from the days 30 years ago when the few comics shops around sold mostly old comics to collectors and were run, says Liebowitz, “by guys in undershirts whose shops looked like their bedrooms--stacks of comics everywhere.”

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. This new twist took Marvel to the top of the comics heap and spawned a whole new array of mutants and aliens with super powers and a couple of neuroses to go with them.

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%. There are comic books about rock stars like Prince and Madonna; comic books about movies like “Alien” and “Predator”; underground and erotic comics; there was a comic book a while back about Mother Teresa.

“But with that many titles, if you over-order only a few of each one, you can soon dissipate all your profits in excess inventory,” says Barry Short, 35, who owns 21st Century Comics & Toys in Orange.

Still, few get rich selling comic books. Liebowitz, for instance, who is 49 and owns three stores, still earns less than he did as a real estate executive. And many stores come and go as quickly as the seasons. Started by hobbyists who get in over their heads, they soon run out of capital.

Because it’s a fringe business, the average store grosses no more than $80,000 nationwide, according to one survey. Local stores tend to do better, store owners say.

At Fantasy Illustrated, located in a strip shopping center in Garden Grove, sales were $147,000 through the first nine months of 1990, up from $127,000 in all of 1989. Like most comics retailers, owner Dave Smith says the recession hasn’t hurt new comics sales, perhaps because they are a relatively inexpensive hobby.

But some of the vintage comic books prized by collectors aren’t appreciating quite as fast, according to Overstreet’s Price Update, a price guide for collectors. But vintage books are what Smith, 36, in shoulder-length hair and jeans, has loved since he began collecting them as a kid. He stopped selling posters and T-shirts because he says those businesses have become too dicey.

“You can make money if you’re the first one on your block to have, say, a Batman poster and you don’t order too many,” he says.

“But you can go to any mall and buy a Bart Simpson T-shirt. I want to sell you a $500 vintage comic.”

In a glass case in the long, narrow shop is an example of what he’s talking about: the first issue of Batman, with the caped crime-fighter and his sidekick, Robin, swinging on ropes across a lurid yellow cover with the Gotham skyline in the background. Sold for a dime in 1940, it fetches a hefty $10,000 now.

Many comic book stores, however, will sell just about anything to get people in the store--movie posters, toys, games, even baseball cards, because the appeal of comic books is still basically limited by the perception that they are either sleazy or for kids.

“Guys like me,” says Liebowitz, owner of the Golden Apple stores, “who want to make a business out of it rather than being just a hobbyist, we try to make the stores inviting and interesting. We’re not a mainstream entertainment yet, like videos, but we get a little closer all the time.”

Some owners are taking the logical next step: Like Liebowitz and Steve Reizner, a former social worker who owns two stores in San Diego, they’re forming small chains.

And even if comics sales don’t grow, there will always be a steady core of readers who come in regularly when new titles are released.

“Comics embrace a basic mythos that appeals to everyone,” says Maggie Thompson, an editor of Comics Buyer’s Guide. “Superman is the ultimate wish fulfillment; Spiderman is the quintessential, tormented teen-ager.”