Pulp Is the Key Ingredient in Success of Spanish-Language Comic Books : Reading: Mexican publishers find in the Valley’s Latino population an eager audience for their illustrated tales of action, thrills and romance.

Kenton Jones and Keith Barret paced slowly toward each other on the dusty mesa, hands twitching over their holstered pistols and ready for a showdown.

” En fin, todas las cosas llegan a su fin ,” said Jones, the tall, dark gunslinger. He reached for his revolver, but the slick-fingered Barret was too fast.

” Se acabo, Kenton ,” Barret whispered to the wounded man.

Cowboys speaking Spanish? Que?

Barret, a black-hatted, blond heartthrob, is among the stars of El Libro Vaquero , one of more than a dozen weekly Spanish-language comic books found in Latino niches throughout the San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles.

Targeting the growing number of Spanish speakers in Southern California, distributors import the thick, pocket-size pulp books--called novelas --primarily from Mexico and sell them here, where readers snap them up for between 75 cents and $1.35.

Novelas follow the adventures of a host of characters, from drug smugglers and mad scientists to samurai and blond bombshells. And, of course, they follow the likes of Kenton Jones, who, in true Western style, warned Keith Barret that his time had come--only to be told that his time had come instead.

About 40 distributors sell the comic books to newsstands, bookstores and corner markets throughout greater Los Angeles, said Carlos Bacelis, who owns the Laurel News in Pacoima and distributes novelas to bookstores in San Fernando, Pasadena and beyond.

Customers, who hop off buses at a nearby stop, pass by to browse through rows of colorful novelas and magazines at Bacelis’ newsstand, a portable paperback library that clings to the side of a market at the intersection of Laurel Canyon and Van Nuys boulevards.

There, the latest issue of Artes Marciales , a martial arts drama set in feudal Japan, is prominently displayed next to a rack filled with Joyas de Literatura , a sort of Cliff’s Notes of great Western literature, but with pictures. There’s Rudyard Kipling’s “La Aldea de los Muertos” (“The Village of the Dead”), Carlos Dickens’ “Cuento de Dos Ciudades” (“A Tale of Two Cities”) and even Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.”

David Soto, a newsstand salesman, picked through the books and pointed out their merits.

He nodded at Hombres y Heroes, illustrated adventures that chronicle the lives of famosos like Sir Walter Raleigh. “Very educational . . . good for children,” he explained in Spanish.

French philosopher Rene Descartes, the star of another book, probably never imagined he would be a comic-strip character uttering, “Pienso, pues existo”-- “I think, therefore I am”--via a word bubble.

Soto said some adult customers are hooked on comic books’ continuing story lines.

“We’ve got a woman who comes here every week to get El Libro Semanal ,” Soto said, referring to an illustrated romance book with a perpetual popularity comparable to the never-say-die American soap opera “Guiding Light.”

Roberto Monti, a publicity manager for Mexapress, which prints many of the books in Mexico, said El Libro Semanal has been rolling off the presses for about 40 years, with more than 2,000 issues. “There are grandmothers, their daughters and their daughters that buy the books,” Monti said.

Novela buyers in the United States tend to be first-generation Mexican immigrants, Monti said. Exports to the United States--mostly to the Los Angeles area--account for about 5% of his company’s novela circulation.

“Latinos with roots in Mexico want to keep reading the stories they used to read” in Mexico, Monti said. Occasionally, buyers also include English-speakers trying to learn Spanish or travelers who discovered the books on trips to Mexico, vendors say.

Publishers say the most popular novela genres, both here and in Mexico, are police adventures, horror stories and cowboy tales--the last filled with characters with names like Edgar, Kim and Junior.

Many of them are set in the United States, although the books are made for Mexican markets and then shipped across the border.

El Libro Policiaco details gritty police stories on the mean streets of San Francisco and Chicago, for example. Novela fans in cosmopolitan Mexico City don’t read the exploits of their own police--they follow New York’s finest.

And then there are the books’ heroes. Who can explain the presence of so many muscular blond characters?

“Wishful thinking, I guess,” said Bror Lesham, a marketing manager at Grupo Piramide, Mexapress’ parent company in Mexico City. “It makes them more American.”

Both adults and children respond to the action stories, said Rafael Marquez Torres, who oversees a line of seven action novelas . Certain novelas are tailored for adults, however, and many of those are filled with pictures of scantily clad, full-figured women and are plainly labeled with warnings prohibiting their sale to anyone under 18. Joke books, also popular, specialize in double-entendres and raunchy humor.

At Libreria Mexico, a bookstore in San Fernando, Martin Alvarado flipped through one of the explicit adult novelas for a few minutes before he decided on El Libro Vaquero and a used paperback.

“I like to have a book handy when I’m waiting for a bus. . . . They’re small and easy to carry,” said Alvarado, a shy, Guadalajara-born cook who lives in Sylmar. “But I have to be careful which ones I buy, or my girlfriend will kill me.”

Like the novelas , American adult comic books also have a sexual edge, but the similarities end there. American adult comics and their popular counterparts from Japan often stray into the avant-garde to address social problems, philosophy, demons and the occult, said Gustav Baron, owner of the Fantasy Castle comic-book store in Tarzana.

“These Gothic horrors and demonic stories are geared toward the mature mind,” Baron said.

Torres said that, in contrast, novelas are meant for the average reader and use simple Spanish. “We try to appeal to everyone,” he said.

American comic-book characters, such as Spiderman ( El Hombre Arana ), also appear in the novelas and are big sellers. Marvel Comics and DC Comics, which own the rights to many of the nation’s most popular super heroes, license their characters to companies in Mexico and other countries.

The Mexican companies, in turn, translate existing comics into Spanish, said Pamela Rutt, a spokeswoman for Marvel. Licensing their comics to publishers in Mexico and Spain, who then sell them in the United States through distributors, has been the only way to reap profits from Spanish-language comics thus far, she said.

“We don’t publish anything in Spanish ourselves, and I don’t know of any companies here that do,” Rutt said. “We test-marketed bringing Spanish comic books into select American markets, with not the kind of success we’d like.”

Novela publishers in Mexico hope their still-disorganized network of distributors and small street-corner selling points in Los Angeles and the Valley will expand and translate into lots of pesos. If the cost of exporting the books remains low and customs duties stay lenient, the funnies business may become big business with increasing Spanish readership.

“The books have become increasingly popular in California,” Monti said. “It’s a market that we see expanding, and it’s got a lot of potential.”

Grupo Piramide’s Lesham said marketers in Mexico are studying 1990 census figures to find the best places to sell novelas in California. Marketers have been frustrated so far, he said, because statistics on Latinos do not indicate where first-generation Latin American immigrants--the main buyers of the books--live and work.

Almost 40% of Los Angeles residents are Latino, according to the 1990 Census, and percentages are even higher in Valley communities such as Arleta and Pacoima, where Latinos make up about 74% of the population, and San Fernando, where about 83% of residents are Latino. The numbers were good news for novela publishers.

“At this point, the market is wide open,” Lesham said.