Hair Apparents : Style: Barbers turn heads into art forms, etching everything from basketball players to Batman on the skulls of young black men.

There’s magic going on at The Cosmic Cut.

The hip downtown Inglewood hair salon is a place where teen-agers slink in, baseball hats covering overgrown heads; an hour later, chests sticking out, they leave sans hats with cuts so hot they sizzle.

An afternoon in the shop, which draws customers from as far away as Orange County, shows you the cutting edge in black hairstyles.

Its founder, Emmanuel Jones, sets the 13-year-old shop’s far-out tone with his own bizarre style: EMMANUEL is etched ear-to-ear in huge block letters.

This is a place where some cutters keep a notebook and paper--to preview their creations--next to the sterilized scissors. Here, haircutting has reached an art form known in industry parlance as “hair graphics.”

Clipper art uses the skull for a canvas. Picture a basketball player in mid-air jamming a ball in the hoop, a smiling Mickey Mouse, the Nike symbol, the Joker--all shaved into the backs of heads.

“I can do anything I can draw,” said Tai Miller, one of the shop’s popular clippers. “Roger Rabbit, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Bambi, the Smurfs, any of them.”

None of them, however, would be allowed inside the doors of Inglewood High School, which is around the corner from the shop.

In a clash of cultural vision, Principal Lawrence Freeman has banned the cuts, saying blacks do not need any more hurdles on the way to success. He even forced the current student body president to let his designs grow out before letting him run for the leadership post.

But inside the Cosmic Cut, that view gets short shrift. Jones considers the cuts so popular that they will cross over to the the white culture. Someday you’ll be able to get one at SuperCuts, he said.

Between trims, Jones, his wire-rimmed spectacles slung low on the nose, philosophizes out loud, talks up the black merchandise advertised on the walls, tells wild stories to the youngsters lined up for their chance in the chair and supervises occasional songfests from the shop’s second-floor balcony.

He has turned his shop into a hangout, a classroom, a marketplace, an amateur theater.

“It’s more than just a barbershop,” said Cindy Cameron, one of Jones’ staff. “It’s an entertainment complex. You get more than a haircut. You get a show.”

Cosmic Cut outgrew its humble roots in a closet-like shop on Market Street about six months ago, moving down the block to a two-story salon where a dozen heads can be trimmed at a time.

The closely cropped haircuts embellished with designs first became popular among young blacks on the East Coast and then spread to California in the mid-1980s, Jones said.

Jones’ 28-year-old son, Kevin, who also works at the shop, recalls cutting small lines in the mid-’80s and then occasional peace symbols and outlines of Africa. Now the designs fluctuate with the popular cultural icons of the day.

The younger Jones said he etched thousands of bat symbols onto heads during the recent Batman craze. In one 40-minute session he copied an intricate T-shirt design of a grimacing Joker onto one teen-ager’s skull.

Jones, 50, said black hairstyles are a creature of the times, with Afros, short crops and processed curls going in and out of style.

The graphic cut will be the cut of the ‘90s for the in crowd, Jones said. For those who can’t decide on a particular graphic for their head, there are fade cuts in which the top of the head has long hair and the sides are shaved clean and different color styles in which patches of the head are dyed red, blond or some other color.

The reasons for sporting the graphic cuts are as varied as the designs themselves.

“It separates you from everyone else,” said Willis Turner, 19, a college student who was waiting for a Chicken-Hawk design one day last week. “Girls notice you.”

Turner of Placentia says he drives to Inglewood every couple of weeks for a new hair graphic because he doesn’t trust his head to Orange County barbers.

Upkeep is a constant concern with the graphic cuts, which cost anywhere from $8 for a simple part to $20 and more for designer pictures that require more intricate clipper action. The cuts get fuzzy after a week and lose their picture completely in two weeks.

Brandon Braff, 17, an amateur dancer who attends Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles, said a wild cut gives him an added lift. “You feel like a new man when you come out of that chair,” he said.

One high school track coach came into the shop one weekend because he had told his team members that he would get a graphic cut if the students won a big track meet. The white coach left the small shop with the school’s initials shaved into the back of his otherwise conservative hairstyle.

Freeman, who bans earrings on males and anything that can be construed as gang attire from Inglewood High, sums up the view of those who find the cuts laughable.

“Kids have every constitutional right to make themselves look like a fool,” he said. “But we are presenting our children as marketable items who have to be accepted for jobs and schools. When I send a student from Inglewood High School, I want someone I can be proud of.”

Jones, of course, disagrees. He sees in the wild haircuts an effort by young blacks to seek empowerment and build self-esteem in a society that tends to view blacks as a whole in a negative light.

“Graphic cuts stir up a lot of excitement among those who see them,” Jones said. “When the energy is focused on the person with the graphics, they feel it and it raises their self-esteem.”