“Comic books are an unacknowledged art form,” Gustavson argued.

Reading was sort of defended at opposite poles of the Valley Sunday.

The eastern front was held by the little troops of the kingdom of the lurid and the bizarre, who massed in a pair of shabby garages in a tawdry section of North Hollywood. The western ramparts were made of money and good taste in Westlake Village.

Not since Churchill and Stalin were on the same side have there been such mismatched allies.

Westlake Village is an amazing town where every house and office structure from horizon to horizon is the same color, a muted cafe au lait that blends ever so gracefully with the tan suede tones of the surrounding hills. All roofs are red tile. Trees that appear breast-fed to vitamin-packed maturity line pristine avenues surrounding the precisely excavated lake. It looks like a set for a 1962 Walt Disney movie, probably starring the young Hayley Mills as an adorable tomboy.

At the North Ranch Community Center, hung with original art, men and women attending a wine tasting filled a meeting room with an arched high ceiling and walls of arctic white, carpeted in dove gray and light blue. They paid $10 each to rate five wines on a scale of 1 (the nadir of “not to my taste”) to 10 (the zenith of “outstanding”).

The money will go to build a library in Westlake Village, whose residents now wear out books at the Thousand Oaks and Las Virgenes libraries.

A string trio, three locals who play professionally in symphonies, wove a gentle melancholy from Beethoven’s Trio No. 1, Opus 3. The crowd was mostly over 50, ruddy-faced men in navy blue blazers and women with silver-frosted hair in pastel dresses and pearls, conversing softly.

If quiet good taste was alligators, they could have opened a shoe store.

The money raised goes toward the $2 million needed to build the library, said Kathi Anderson, president of The Friends of the Westlake Village Library.

The group has raised “$20,000 or so, in bits and parts,” she said, which gives them the financial standing “to start seeking grants from the larger foundations.”

The friends distributed little pamphlets on light blue paper listing 14 reasons why Westlake should have a library, including “will be convenient for our joggers” and “will be accessible to young people on bicycles.”

Most of the young Westlakers seemed to be on dirt-riding motorcycles that afternoon. But there were a number of bicycles lying around the headquarters of The Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society in a battered, mustard-yellow little building on Burbank Boulevard, where the 18th Annual San Fernando Valley Comic Book Convention was under way.

The 18th and probably last convention, said Rob Gustavson, who organized them. Gustavson wants to concentrate on The Ninth Nebula, a comic book store he runs in a rear building about the size of a small bedroom. The walls are covered with comic books dating back almost 50 years and posters of comic-book and science fiction movie heroes like Conan the Barbarian.

Technically, the convention was next door, in a converted garage where fans traded old comics. The two outbuildings share a yard behind the science fiction society’s headquarters with a junked car and trailer.

Scores of comic fans trooped between the two buildings. Some were adults (“90% of my business comes from people over 30 years old,” Gustavson said), but most appeared to be about junior high school age.

They traded comic books, but mostly they read them. Clutching “Dreadstar” or “V for Vendetta,” they covered the available space--steps, floors, patchy grass and walls--with figures in the intense slouch of the typical comic-book reader, sign of the blood enemy to generations of druggists.

While most of the early teen-age group long ago deserted to TV and video games, there are still faithful readers.

Gustavson, at 37, is too young to remember the Great Comic Scare of the early 1950s, when Congress debated the possibility that lurid comic books would create a generation of psychopaths, frothing at the mouth with perverse impulses. Strangely, that generation, now in its 40s and 50s, looks about as dangerous as so many turnips next to what came after it.

Today’s comic-book heroes appear to live in a more complicated world than the classic era of the 1940s, when Superman was too simple-minded to recognize Lois Lane’s panting lust.

Batman faces the angst of aging. Wonder Woman appears from the historical record to have gone through a siren phase, her golden chest plate swelling to centerfold proportions, but as the years passed, she deflated into a feminist.

“Comic books are an unacknowledged art form,” Gustavson argued. “The important thing is that kids 10 and 12 years old come in and put down money, their own money, to get something to read.”

Benjamin Wright, 14, a short white kid, and George Quintero, 16, a tall black friend, dealt in comics like frontier horse traders. “Jeez, I may have to give my ‘Comic books are serious literature’ speech,” he said when he learned he was talking to The Times.

Wright, of Canoga Park, signed up for the business magnet high school downtown because “I want to know that business stuff, computers and accounting.”

He agreed that made him an unusual 14-year-old. “So? I’m weird. I read comic books.”

Good luck with the library, Westlake.

But will a big-bucks library produce 14-year-old accountants?