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Still rubbing sleep from their eyes, youngsters again are adding color and hope to the cool gray morning as they line up by the road to await the big yellow bus that will take them to school.

As they shift, shuffle and measure each other apprehensively, shiny black duffel bags, sturdy leather backpacks and big floppy Esprit sacks in tony pastels swing casually by their sides.

Only a few carry brown paper lunch bags. Even fewer seem to grip lunch boxes.

Those are the smart kids. They've already mastered their economics lessons. Notice how tightly they grasp the boxes. They know that in another decade or two the kits could be worth big bucks.

Along with baseball cards and comic books, lunch boxes have become a collectible -- yesterday's novelty, today's hot investment.

So far, however, lunch boxes primarily attract collectors who simply appreciate their homey artistry, enjoy the challenge of finding rare models and delight in the evocative nostalgia that washes over them when they stumble across a Roy Rogers or a Mickey Mouse or a Hopalong Cassidy just like the one in which they packed the peanut-butter sandwiches of their youth.

But rare is the collector who can conceal his glee as he shows off a lunch box that he picked up for six bits at a garage sale two years ago, and which now sells for $40 in an antiques shop.

Lunch boxes that retailed for $2 or $3 in the 1950s and 1960s now regularly command $50 to $100 or more, depending on their rarity and condition. A Howdy Doody box that sold for $2 in 1956 now fetches $100 to $175, and a Beatles box that sold for less than $3 in 1966 brings $100 to $200 these days, according to Scott Bruce of Somerville, Mass.

Though he has been collecting lunch boxes only two years, Bruce is somewhat of the Baedeker of the trade, the person to whom other collectors turn for information and guidance. He publishes a quarterly newsletter for lunch-box enthusiasts -- Hot Boxing, formerly The Paileontologist's Retort. He's also assembling a lunch-box price guide, compiling material for a picture book about lunch boxes and talking about printing a calendar to feature a pail mate of the month.

But not even Bruce knows how many lunch-box enthusiasts abound in the country, busily building shelves in bedroom, garage and den for their burgeoning collections.

Clearly, however, new interest in old lunch boxes is on the rise. The increasingly inflated prices they draw is just one sign of their growing popularity. Another is their dwindling availability at thrift stores, garage sales and flea markets, where collectors customarily have cleaned up cheaply; now they find themselves more often visiting antiques shops and toy shows, where prices tend to be more dear.

"In the past year we've seen an incredible increase in interest in lunch boxes," remarked Natasha Shawver, part owner of Scooby's, a Berkeley toy shop with an extensive selection of lunch boxes. "People who grew up with these boxes are now getting old enoughto appreciate them. They want to remember their childhood."

People have been collecting lunch boxes for years, but until recently many of them have been reluctant to come out of the closet. "When I first started collecting the boxes I felt embarrassed about it. When I bought one I always made sure I got a paper bag so I could hide it. It hasn't been the kind of thing that adults do," remarked Bob Carr, director of counseling services at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. Carr has been collecting lunch kits since 1972.

Lunch boxes, according to Bruce, other collectors and manufacturers, have been produced for nearly a century. They were inspired by the tobacco tins and lard cans that miners, farmers and railroad workers in England appropriated to lug meals to their jobs, and which they handed down to their children to pack with school snacks.

The lunch boxes that intrigue most collectors, however, began to be produced in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. They were simple but sturdy metal boxes -- blue or red -- on one side of which youngsters would stick a decal of a reigning cultural icon, such as Mickey Mouse or Pinocchio.

In 1950, Aladdin Industries of Nashville, Tenn., began to save them the trouble by becoming the first lunch-box company to "character-decorate " kits. The character they chose was Hopalong Cassidy, whose television series had premiered the year before. Though Hoppy's series was short-lived, his decal on Aladdin's lunch boxes was just the shot in the arm that the company needed to gain an edge in marketing.

Within two years, however, Aladdin's principal competitor, the Thermos Co. of Freeport, Ill., not unmindful of the success of Aladdin's Hopalong kits, rounded up Roy Rogers to ride on its lunch boxes.

"From then on it was a horse race," said Bruce.

In the early 1950s, full-color lithographs succeeded decals, and in the early 1960s embossings in a relief or three-dimensional format began to appear on the kits. Vinyl kits flourished briefly in the '60s, but were history by the early 1980s.

Most collectors are especially keen on metal lunch boxes, which are vanishing quickly from school lockers. Both Thermos and Aladdin made their last metal boxes within the past year. Nowadays, lunch kits generally are of molded plastic or insulated fabric, and instead of lithographs the artwork once again usually is a decal.

Over the past three decades Thermos and Aladdin, which between them have corraled more than 90 percent of the country's annual lunch-box trade, have vied to sign up one fleeting cultural hero after another to appear on their kits.

Curiously, they have recruited characters not so much from comics, movies, music and sports as television. As a consequence, a typical lunch-box collection reads like a bright and concise scan of the evolution of the medium, from prime-time sitcoms to Saturday morning cartoons. While Westerns accounted for most of the lunch-box art in the 1950s, today's kits are more likely to bear the likeness of a space hero or cartoon character. "Television made lunch boxes big business," said Bruce . models.)

Some television shows yielded several designs; at least seven different Roy Rogers lunch kits have been identified, while "Gunsmoke" produced four models and "Bonanza" three.

Current high-ticket kits include a 1934 Mickey Mouse (one of the few in circulation recently sold at an East Coast auction for $500), a 1966 blue- metal box featuring the Beatles, another Beatles box -- "Yellow Submarine" -- and boxes adorned with Soupy Sales, Twiggy, "Lost in Space," "Star Trek," Batman, Superman, the "Jetsons," Paladin and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet.

A box need not feature a popular person or subject to be a valuable collectible; one eagerly sought box, for example, was inspired by the television series "Brave Eagle," which was telecast only during the 1955-56 season.

On the other hand, several popular television series -- "Leave It to Beaver," "Rin Tin Tin," "Sky King," "Rawhide" -- apparently never inspired a lunch box. Neither did "Dennis the Menace." Because Farrah Fawcett refused to have her likeness reproduced on the side of a lunch box, no "Charlie's Angels" kit was made until after she left the series. And most curious of all, no Elvis Presley lunch box ever was produced, apparently because his early gyrations were so scandalous tha t lunch-box makers couldn't see parents letting their children openly pack around his likeness, even if he were shown just from the waist up. (For years, however, rumors have circulated of a rare Elvis lunch box; collectors now believe that if such a box exists it was homemade, probably by a youth who clipped a photo of Elvis from a magazine and shellacked it to the side of a kit.)

For this school year, Thermos produced lunch kits with 28 different characters, while Aladdin released 17. Thermos is scoring big with Alf, "Silverhawks" and Barbie and the Rockers, while fast movers for Aladdin are G.I. Joe, Lazer Tag, My Little Pony and anything related to the Disney family. (According to collectors and manufacturers, current and recent models that could be tomorrow's collectibles include Alf, Rambo, G.I. Joe, Snoopy, Garfield, the Muppets, Cabbage Patch, Indiana Jone s and anything with either a space or Disney theme.)

Like major-league baseball teams scrambling to sign valuable free agents, Thermos and Aladdin already are assembling their lineups for the 1988 school< year. Thermos officials have recruited Pee-wee Herman, "Star Trek: The Next Generation," and unspecified characters from films to be released next year by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Aladdin, meanwhile, is banking on Captain Power and the Visionaries, the former a new inter-active television series, the latter a new line of action figures that are to incorporate a hologram. Does that mean that Aladdin will have a hologram winking from the sides of some of its boxes? "We'll have to wait and see," coyly replied Linda French, the company's product manager.

Gary Caplan, a North Hollywood marketing consultant who represents Thermos in acquiring licensing rights to hot properties, says he looks primarily for characters tied to a potentially popular movie or television show and backed by a line of toys or novelties.

"We were committed to Alf before the show hit the air," said Caplan. "We saw something there that we felt would make a good product. We knew that the producers had made a deal with Coleco for a major toy launch. We knew it would be on TV on Monday nights. We didn't know if it would make it, but we felt that the uniqueness of the character and its time slot would draw a huge children's audience."

Some 8 to 9 million lunch kits are sold annually, a total that has remained fairly static over the past decade. While the upper end of the market has been eroded by school hot-lunch programs, the proliferation of fast-food franchises, a tendency by children to stop carrying boxes at a younger age, and an economy that is drawing both parents out of the home, providing more money to buy prepared lunches but less time to pack meals, the lower end has been expanded by the growing population of children at nursery schools, day- care centers and baby sitters. (That drift also explains why a disproportionate share of today's kits are decorated with cute juvenile characters that appeal principally to pre-schoolers -- Popples, Fluppy Dogs, Moon Dreamers and the like.)

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