Wrong Kind of Funny Business? : Reform: John Fulce once sold comic books. Now, he is fighting to clean them up because, he says, they are ‘poisoning our culture’ with their sex and violence.

John Fulce has all the fervor of a man reformed. Only in his case it’s not cigarettes. Or booze.

John Fulce has sworn off comic books.

Fulce used to sell comics. Actually, he lived comics. He owned 30,000--a whole garage full--of them. There wasn’t room for the family car.

But Fulce, a born-again Christian, became increasingly disturbed by the content of the items he sold. A few years ago, he decided the time had come to sell his comic book shop, the Land of Oohs and Ahs in Fountain Valley. Out went his private comic collection. His son even sold his collection.

Now, Fulce is fighting the very industry from which he used to derive pleasure and profit. “If the comic book industry can’t clean itself up, I’ll do everything in my power to see that they will,” he declares. “I’ll do whatever it takes--boycotts, lawsuits, whatever.”

What caused this reformation?

“When I started reading comic books, they had heroes you could look up to,” fumes Fulce, 40. “Now they’re telling kids it’s OK to curse, to commit adultery.”

Today, caped heroes have sex before marriage, occasionally sleep with somebody who’s married and seem to be a lot less reluctant to slice up a villain or drill him full of holes.

“We’re poisoning our culture, not just with comics but with movies and TV, too,” says Fulce.

Like all serious collectors, he was long aware of comicdom’s most famous book, “Seduction of the Innocent,” a 1950s treatise in which psychologist Frederic Wertham charged that reading comics led to juvenile delinquency.

At the time of its publication, a Senate subcommittee holding hearings on juvenile delinquency heard about the book and grilled officials of some comic companies about whether they were subverting America’s youth for profit.

Chastened by the bad publicity, the publishers vowed to go and sin no more. They adopted the Comics Code, which prohibited the usual sort of sex and mayhem and went even further in making the comics an uplifting experience. You couldn’t, for instance, portray a police officer or a government official in an unflattering light.

Last year, however, Fulce wrote a sequel to Wertham’s book called “Seduction of the Innocent Revisited.” It was brought out last August by a Christian publishing house that specializes in exposes of the New Age movement and other bugbears of the Christian right.

In his sequel, Fulce includes a number of what he believes are suspect panels taken from mainstream comics. These, he says, include some from “Batman” that advocate abortion rights; from the “Books of Magic” that revel in magic and nudity, and that are not labeled--as some comics are--for mature readers only; from “Thor” that espouse New Age philosophy, and from several comics that portray fundamentalist Christians unflatteringly.

“If the porno industry were to use a vehicle to lure kids in, it would be comic books,” Fulce declares.

All this might seem like a tempest in a teapot to many adults. Indeed, comic book companies say the majority of their readers are young adults.

But comics are widely regarded as a children’s medium. And because kids are reading them, Fulce says parents should at least take a look.

At one end of the scale, Fulce objects to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles saying “damn.” At the other end is material that most people probably would agree ought not be sold to children: underground comics that depict sexual acts. Fulce carries a stack of such comics around in a plain brown envelope when appearing on Christian talk shows.

This isn’t being sold to kids, comic book shop owners insist. It’s kept behind the counter and sold only to adults.

As for more traditional comics--the super-heroes like Batman and Spider-Man--shop owners say each family should decide what its children can read. What Fulce is doing, the shop owners contend, is really trying to censor what can be read by adults.

When comic books began in the 1930s, they garnered a lot of adult readers; during World War II, millions of adults in uniform chuckled over them. But after the war, those people went home, got jobs, bought houses, started families and drifted away from comic books.

The publishers, desperate to hold onto adults--the people with the most cash--juiced up their product. There were horror comics and violent detective comics with sexy dames and crooked cops.

Then along came “Seduction of the Innocent” and the Senate hearings. The comics got tamer. They became, for the first time, almost entirely written for children.

Wholesome comic books--Fulce remembers “Mighty Mouse” fondly--were the ones he started reading in 1957, when he was 7 years old and laid up in the hospital for months with a ruptured spleen. His family was a blue-collar one in Dallas with seven children and a father who drove a truck.

Fulce wasn’t particularly religious then. He landed in Southern California with a wife and two children--a third would come later--in 1976. He worked for a landscape designer. In 1978, he became a born-again Christian. Two years later, he turned what was by then a hobby of more than two decades into a business and opened the comic book shop.

It lasted seven years--until he began to believe that the old Comics Code was in the trash heap. In 1987, he sold the store.

Lately, he has made the rounds of Christian talk shows while studying to become a minister in the Church of God. He is now an antiques dealer, and his wife is a preschool teacher.

On a recent morning, Fulce, dressed in an open-necked plaid shirt, slacks and loafers, responded to a rumor that is making the rounds of local comic shop owners, who say he started this crusade when his own shop began to falter. financially.

“Comments were made that I was so conservative I ran off my customers, that the shop was not doing well,” he said, leaning forward in an overstuffed chair to make a point. “That’s a blatant lie. I made a very good living out of that shop until I couldn’t stomach the stuff the publishers were putting out anymore.”

It was shops like his, he says, that gave the comic book industry a new lease on life after the mom-and-pop stores that used to be where most people bought their comics were finished off by chain convenience stores. Comics sales slid downhill for a while but started coming back as the comics shops proliferated in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Now, some of these shops have been swept up in the same backlash that has fought against sexually explicit music lyrics and pornographic videos.

Little of the movement has been evident so far in California, but in Illinois a few years ago, one comic book shop owner was convicted of selling obscene materials and lost his lease. About the same time, a shop owner in Calgary, Canada, was convicted on an obscenity charge.

What would Wertham, author of the original “Seduction of the Innocent,” make of all this? He might be amused to find that in the world of big-time comic book collecting, where a 1940s-era Batman comic can sell for $10,000, copies of his book are now collector’s items at $60 to $300 a copy.