The Comics Crusade : Orange County parents are protesting material they say is inappropriate for children. Retailers and industry officials say censorship is not the answer.

Candy Kanney of Tustin didn’t have much time. Her kids would be home from school soon. Pushing the documents across the table, her nice-to-meet-you face turned serious.

Comic books, six of them, purchased at the grocery store, toy stores and specialty shops. She used to let her boys buy them to encourage reading--but that, she says, was before she took a good look inside.

After actually reading them, Kanney says she found the dialogue dark--to say the least. The passage from an issue of “Saint Sinner” she picked up a few months ago in the supermarket was highlighted in florescent marker as an example of comic book conversation most parents are unaware of.

“Gods kill their parents,” says a sorcerer to a young boy. “Their deaths will make you a god.”

“Can you believe that children can buy these things?” she asked, thumbing through a copy of “Evil Ernie,” its pages filled with decapitated bodies, women in G-strings and lots of blood. “Parents aren’t aware of what’s in them; they just give their kid the money, thinking all comics are appropriate for children.”

Some have been banned from the classroom and taken from the bedroom, yet the staple-bound books and their young consumers continue to feed a billion-dollar business. Not all of the books are violent, but there’s enough concern among Orange County parents to generate a small crusade against material they don’t think should be available to children.

As expected, the camps are divided.

Parents such as Kanney say their pleas for “accountability” and some sort of rating system have been casually dismissed by retailers and comic book companies.

The comic book companies, however, say the more violent books are aimed toward teen-agers and young adults--not children. They say their system of “self-censorship” is sufficient, and that it’s not their responsibility to baby-sit the nation’s children.

“Parents have to monitor what their children read, listen to and watch,” says Detective Comics spokeswoman Martha Thomases. “I don’t think you get a day off.”

Several comic book industry officials cite the First Amendment as protection from censorship. And Comics Magazine Assn. of America president Michael Silberkleit reminds concerned parents that members of the national association are regulated by the watch-dog Comics Code Authority, a body of American publishers who monitor the books before sale. The guidelines of the code restrict the depiction of violence and adult situations.

The group was developed in the early 1950s after a Senate subcommittee urged the industry to clean up its act. Now, if the books adhere to the guidelines of the code, a small stamp is placed on the upper right corner of the cover.

Parents up in arms about comic book violence are not impressed with the stamp of approval, saying self-regulation is not enough. They say that even the books with the Comic Code stamp contain excessive violence and sex.

Retailers in Orange County say they are busiest Wednesday and Thursday afternoons when the new issues arrive. A steady flow of children, teen-agers and adults lines the counters for the latest installments of their continuing sagas.

Will, a Costa Mesa 10-year-old, was leafing through the stacks of comics at Superior Comics in Costa Mesa one Saturday when his mother walked in with a $30 gift certificate her son had received for his birthday.

She says she’s never actually examined Will’s three cardboard boxes of comics but added that she trusts her boy’s taste. Looking around the store, however, she says the sex and depiction of women in some of today’s comics bothers her more than the violence. Like many kids his age, her son often tries to duplicate the drawings in the books--right down to overdeveloped women in next-to-nothing attire--and Mom often doesn’t like the result.

“Some of the women in them . . . with these huge (breasts) . . . I try to tell him that women don’t look like that,” she says.

With the encouragement of Tustin Unified School District Supt. David Andrews, Kanney began speaking in February at local PTA and PTO meetings about what she calls the increasingly darker side of today’s comic books--a parental awareness crusade she hopes to take nationwide. The victims, she says, are good parents with good intentions who simply want Junior to read. A lot of them haven’t even been inside a comic book store, she says.

“I just want people to know what’s out there,” she says.

Sue Prietto of Santa Ana says she found a comic portraying human sacrifice in her 12-year-old son’s closet last year.

“I was really shocked,” she says. “I was totally unaware; you could have knocked me over with a feather.”

Silberkleit says he is concerned that parents such as Kanney are painting the industry with a broad brush, suggesting that all comics are violent and sexually explicit.

“People should know that not all comics are bad,” says Silberkleit, who is also chairman of Archie Comics. “I can’t account for all my fellow publishers, but their are there are many of us that wouldn’t touch that stuff.”

Silberkleit defends his characters as “still good and wholesome,” and says he has big plans for Archie in the future, including a movie deal. But he also defends the right of comic book store owners to choose what they want to sell from their stores.

“You just can’t stop the retailer from selling something that’s going to make him some money,” he says.

Archie Comics sells about a 1.5 million copies a month, with a dozen different titles. Larger companies such as Marvel Comics sell about 12 million comic books a month, Silberkleit says. The industry crashed early last year, when too many titles and investors saturated the market, he says, but business is rebounding.

John Beck, owner of Comicmania in Fullerton, says that the violence in many of today’s cartoon books is simply a reflection of a violent society. He and other retailers contend that violence is on television, in the movies and on the street, so they aren’t surprised that it’s made its way into comic books.

Some of the books are marked “for the mature reader,” a designation that confines them to a special section in his Fullerton store for customers over age 18. But like the Comic Code stamp of approval, the “mature reader” stamp is a self-regulation measure, not a federal law restricting their sale to minors.

Beck says he will fire any employee who sells a comic book with a mature-reader label to an (under 18) . . . patron but added that it’s a judgment call, and that not all comic book store owners follow suit.

“If we refuse to sell a kid a book, he just brings back one of his parents, usually Dad, to buy it for him. . . .There’s nothing you can do when they do that,” he says. Kids also pick up copies of comics at swap meets and garage sales, he added.

Andrews, the Tustin Unified School District superintendent, says he was surprised by the availability of comics with violent content and has encouraged parental education on the subject.

“I was somewhat shocked,” Andrews says. “I didn’t realize that kids could buy these things at the market.”

Andrews says that he talks to parents at school meetings, urging them to start letter-writing campaigns and other measures aimed at comic book violence.

“My feeling is that we have to do something to manage what kids can buy in the market,” he says. “There’s too much violence in our society. I personally, from an objective standpoint, believe that children are learning violent behavior from what they see and read.”

Pavilions General Manager Bob Johnson, who oversees 33 stores in Los Angeles and Orange counties, says he decided not to purchase three comic book titles six months ago after he saw the violence they contained.

“I was shocked that (the violence) was to that degree,” he says, explaining that the “Saint Sinner,” “Sabre Tooth” and “Maxx” comics he saw contained “overt expressions of violence and comments about suicide.

“We just saw no redeeming qualities in carrying these particular products,” he says.

A Marvel Comics spokesman says “Saint Sinner” was canceled about six months ago, and “Sabre Tooth” was a limited edition series that ran out about the same time. Executives at Image Comics of Anaheim, which publishes the “Maxx” title, could not be reached for comment.

Such comics are also unwelcome at W.R. Nelson Elementary School in Tustin, says principal Connie Smith. She says last year several students, mostly boys, began bringing comic book trading cards to class, swapping them at lunchtime and recess.

“Our first assumption was that they were like baseball cards, harmless, not a problem,” she recalled. “But I couldn’t believe what was on the cards.”

Smith, who keeps the confiscated cards in the desk drawer of her office, says she is shocked by the transformation of yesterday’s super-heroes into today’s anti-heroes. Now the good guys scowl and pose with scantily dressed women toting semi-automatic rifles.

“Most of the teachers were from the era I was, when there was Archie, Superman and Catwoman,” Smith says, “It’s not the same; they’ve changed.”

Marjee Ellis of Tustin says she was introduced to the changing world of comic books last year, when she didn’t think to look through a generous donation of comics she received for her school district’s “Dinosaur Dash” fund-raiser. After all, comic books have always been a fun reading incentive, she remembered thinking.

“Then I started getting calls from parents,” says the 42-year-old mother of two. “They looked at them and were concerned about the violence. . . . I still feel bad when I talk about it. It was an innocent thing, but I was the one who solicited them; I stuffed them into 3,000 goody bags.”

Says comic store owner Beck of the young readers: “They want the violence. The more violent books, that’s what the kids want.”