The Mythbusters aired their Superhero Special last night, which means all the comic nerds and the tech geeks sat down at the same time to once and for all end debates.

Advance word was that in this episode the “Marvel comic maestros” would be put to the test, but oddly enough, there was but one mention of any specific Marvel character (and that after Adam said “Nocturnal Echo-Locating Flying Mammal Man” and Jamie replied, “Uh, Batman.”) However, it was pretty easy for fans of super hero comic books and films (including me, who would likely not pass this part of the pop culture exam) to guess the caped crusader by the gadgets and myths tested.

Before we get into specifics, I ask that all fans who do not want their suspended belief disturbed in any way to please stop reading now. I mean it. Stop now. I can’t bear the burden of possibly ruining any of your comic book fantasies with such realities.

Still here?

If so, I hope it’s because you, like I, believe that even if reality should prove to ground your superhero, you’ll still enojoy the info — or, like so many MythBuster fans, you’ll debate the outcomes anyway.

Can a superhero’s ring leave an impression on the bad guy’s head? (Or, most likely, can a super villain’s ring leave an impression on a head — ala Punisher’s skull ring.) The MythBusters tried several times, but this was left as Busted as the skull they used.

My verdict: Pigskin over a skull misses the meaty parts, such as a spongier live skin and blood vessels. I’d say you can get a temporary impression (but not a scar). I call for a do-over. (It’s still Plausible for me.)

Can a superhero create a grappling gun that will embed a grapple pin directly into concrete? Can a superhero create an ascending unit to lift him up a grappling rope? And can they be small enough to fit on a superhero’s belt or wrist? (This would bring to mind Batman and a bajillion-dy-two other comic book guys.)

Jamie proved that a rig could be created, one that fit on his arm (not his belt) and while it took him up, they forgot about repelling back down. Adam made a gadget to blast into concrete, but it didn’t remain secure and was rather large. Busted seems to be the call.

My verdict: I’ll concur.

Can a superhero do a quick-change in a phone booth fast enough to save the innocent victim? (The phone booth is a tip-off that we’re talkin’ Superman here, but most of them need to dress and undress again quickly.) Tory, Grant and Kari took on this bit of silliness.

Kari was the fastest with just over 30 seconds (including a sexy hair-flip) to become Mythgirl. Grant was about twice as long, but Grantman did get stuck in the booth… Can’t say that’s a good thing for a superhero. Tory took the longest to create the Spasm (a superhero which will forever remain dear to my heart). Not sure if it was all the accessories or if the Spasm has, well, Spasms which slowed him down…

My verdict: It can’t really be done — but we knew it that. This was for fun (and everyone wants to see the team, especially Kari, in lycra). Busted — but why not do it again anyway? *wink*

Can a superhero’s car traveling at high speed make a 90 degree turn with the help of a grappling hook? (If you’ve never seen this scene in the first Batman movie — or don’t think about things like that to remember them, let alone question them — don’t worry, the replica Batmobile made it pretty clear who it was! *wink*) The team Busted this too, but as you’ll see few of the fans are satisfied with the outcome.

My verdict: Um, err, it sure looked like it wouldn’t work — but here my (lacking) knowledge of materials shows. I’ll stick with the team on this and say Busted.

Should you want to explore more comic book myths, check out Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed (which really is for the comic nerds, not the tech geeks).

For decade after decade, the Hostess company had their spongy, cakey fists wrapped tightly around the last few pages of both Marvel and DC comics. While the rest of the comics’ ad space was dedicated to fuzzy implorations to buy live seahorses or begin an exciting career customizing vans, or hey, selling Grit magazine for fun and profit, Hostess had a full color, full page ad in almost every comic one would read.

In what was one of the most clever product placement arrangements known to man, parodied and appreciated to this day, Hostess commissioned single-page comics in which popular comic book characters would employ Hostess snacks in crimefighting. It’s not as if these panels were the results of some wild half-assery, either. While the villain in each strip was usually a throw-away character created specifically to be thwomped on for a few panels and ultimately trumped by their love of Hostess Twinkies, these pages were well drawn and often cleverly written paeans to the sheer wonderment and omnipotence of the fruit pie. Anyone who’s bitten into a Hostess cupcake knows that these probably weren’t far from the truth. The secret ingredient… is God.

Sure, the heavily armed Robot Snake Army just threw down their laser guns because Iron Man offered them a cupcake in trade. Sure, I’ll let you take my grandmother’s spleen - I’m busy eatin’ this fruit pie! But of course you can have an unholy tryst with my wife, and thank you for the Ho Hos. Imagine the governmental progress that could be had if only someone were to tempt our politicos with cream filled delights! We’re not far from the days of the Twinkicrats and the Suzy-Q-publicans!

Of course they’re ridiculously far-fetched, but they’re also being lost as older comic books are losing footing to trade editions and decaying paper stock. Thankfully, a few archives of these amazing one-shot adventures exist digitally. In this Hostess-centric world, (one in which the sun does not exist, instead replaced by a swirling chocolate mass and life is not perpetuated by light and water, but deliciousness and a flaky crust), one can replace the chosen Hostess product in any ad with the word ‘crack’ to perhaps ascertain a comparable substance native to our heliocentric universe. Try it - it’s like a sad, sad Mad Libs. Alternately, replace said Hostess product name with naughty words for certain unmentionable body parts and have twice as much fun. You’ll never see the Mighty Thor the same way again.

Enjoy a few choice Hostess ads from my Inhumans and Machine Man comics, circa 1975-1980!

Marvel was not oblivious to this painful degree of shilling, and they took it in stride. In fact, Marvel Team-Up #134 featured the first appearance of ‘Golden Oldie’, a transformed version of Peter Parker’s Aunt May with amazing galactic superpowers, sent around the universe to collect Twinkies for Galactus, which were apparently a fair substitute for devouring the life energies of entire planets. Because Twinkies are, holiest of holies, that amazing. Of course, by the end of it all, we saw that it was a dream sequence of a guest editor spot or some other cop-out ending, but for those brief moments, Aunt May knew something other than arthritis and mourning for poor Ben. Let her dream. Let her dream.

Let me just come out and admit that I’m an enormous hypocrite. Sure, I might go on and on about how awesome something is, and how superior it is over another option, but if there’s one thing I’m pretty easily swayed by, it’s the presence of Awesome. Should anything suddenly present its Awesomeness unto me, oh man, will I be over there in a second. I am an Awesome addict, and given the vast, vast array of addictive substances that our modern world presents us with, I think I’ve made the healthy choice. Awesome, and beef tatake, which is basically Awesome in meat form.

My hypocrisy in point : the great ‘graphic novel vs. the comic book’ exploration, way back in September. Who remembers September anyhow? That was like, three years ago. I advocated the simplicity and compactness of the graphic novel over the traditional comic book, but it became recently clear to me that I’d neglected some very important aspects of The Mighty Comic Book in my quest to save space and money.

See, I’ve become enamored with The Inhumans, a genetically altered superhuman team of outcasts from Marvel Comics, who either live in the Himalayas or the Moon, depending on when you’re reading. In searching for their original 12-issue Inhumans miniseries, it dawned on me that the series was not yet collected into a trade paperback format, and I’d have to hunt down the original single issues if I wanted to read about their classic 1975 exploits. While Marvel and DC are both actively collecting their older comics into Archive Editions and Masterworks collections, many miniseries are still unreprinted. So, after a search, I found myself with a complete run of The Inhumans and Machine Man, drawn by such amazing legends as George Perez, Gil Kane and Jack Kirby.

The comics are yellowed, the staples are loose and they’ve clearly been read a few times before. This is a death sentence for anyone with pure collecting on the brain, but those folks can buy officially graded comics if it’s monetary value and preservation that you’re after. There’s a whole creepy conglomerate of giga-nerds who take care of this sort of grading and artificially inflate the values of things. Me, I wanted to lay in bed, sick with the flu, and drift off into the adventures of The Inhumans as they first appeared. And drink cocoa and have a pretty girl bring me soup. And maybe a unicorn. After I started flipping through the first few issues, I noticed the one hugely important thing that trade paperbacks are missing, besides the romance of delicately turning a brittle page and smelling the pulp - the advertisements.

Now, comic book advertisements from 1975 are a whole other breed of advertising, very specifically targeted to the comic-reading audience of young males, and so beautifully, heartbreakingly surreal. It’s fairly apparent that they’re not bothering to conform to any standards of honesty or realism. Often, the comic will break for two pages at a time to make way for black and white ad space. In this way, the original panel flow between paired pages isn’t interrupted, and the ad sections can be easily skipped by the reader. The bottom of the comic page preceding an advertisement even warns the reader that the next couple of pages will be full of advertising, so as not to break the pace of the story too severely. In my own enlightened era, I’ve found that these wide-open spreads of empty promises and quixotic notions to be just as entertaining and emotionally charged as the comic itself. They’re very amusing when you’re not the beleaguered kid stuffing two dollars into an envelope with the promise of learning Instant Kung Fu in 6-to-8 weeks in a desperate attempt at preserving one’s own ass on the way home from school.

If you’re unfamiliar with this brand of advertising, take a look at this gem from the Masculiner Company. Nestled in the warm bosom of the fantasy universe of The Inhumans, those attractive women and outcast muscular men of great ability, the reader is presented with an exciting prospect of his own. The implication that slapping some gluey tufts of hair on your face will make a romantic lothario out of you seems all-too-possible in such a fantastic context. If Black Bolt can level cities with a mere utterance of sound, who’s to say that your new, convincing (and spontaneously appearing) sideburns won’t finally net you that cheerleader who doesn’t know you exist? Couple that with ads that sell you secrets about how to grow 6 inches taller in a week and how to gain 25 pounds of muscle by tomorrow, and you have one violently unrealistic portrayal of the human body and, well, life itself, and it’s all spelled out without any implication that ‘results may vary’ or ‘hammerfist kung-fu technique cannot be learned overnight’ or ‘hell, we’re totally screwing with you here’. Anyone who thinks that only the body images of girls are preyed upon in the media clearly has never read a 1970s-era comic book.

This kind of advertisement featured five distinct categories : body improvement, wacky products, money making schemes, Hostess fruit pies, and individuals selling other comics (often interspersed with the comic publishers selling their own branded accessories). As the decade came to a close, ad space was taken over by full-color ads for video games, candy and Saturday morning cartoons, but a page or two of black-and-white untruths lingered on. Stay tuned.

See, I don’t collect comic books. I don’t live close enough to a comic shop to warrant hunting down the current issues of my favorite characters to keep up with the epic storylines that are happening. Comics also take up a lot of space, what with their fancy backing boards and protective mylar casings, and at $2.50 or more per issue, it’s not a cheap hobby. It feels more like having a pet or paying child support to an estranged spouse than a delight.

So, I collect graphic novels. It sounds fancy and hip, but it’s really just eight or so regular comic issues bound together into book form, like a mega-comic. There’s a scientifically tested probability that if you call them ‘graphic novels’ instead of ‘comic books’, your chance of scoring goes up about 15 percent. Also, showering will increase that percentage. Who’da thunk it?

Cram a year’s worth of drawn-out visual anticipation into a single volume for about 15 bucks and you have gold - the graphic novel. Sure, they’re about 8 months out-of-date as far as comic continuity goes, but they look a lot nicer on a bookshelf, and you can snag ‘em on Amazon or your local bookshoppe on the cheap. They probably won’t be worth more later, as some comic issues are, but profitability usually isn’t my main motive behind my interest in comics. My real motive is that I want to be Batman in more ways that I’m comfortable explaining and I’m trying to glean some of his tricks. So far, I’m up to ‘step one : become a billionaire’. I’m sure that the buttkicking comes somewhere after that, but I’ll skip the whole ‘getting a little boy to live with me and play dress-up’ stage.

In keeping up with the never-ending saga of the immortal Batman, I picked up the recent ‘Face the Face’ storyline, which collects issues 651 to 654 of Batman and issues 817 to 820 of Detective. It deals with Batman’s absence from Gotham, how a reformed Two-Face somehow protected the city while Batman was gone, and Two-Face eventually going crazy again upon batman’s return. While I still don’t understand how a non-physical villian character could defend Gotham city as well as Batman could, nor do I agree with the death of one of Batman’s more important and interesting enemies, The Ventriloquist, it represents an important part of the Batman canon. Ergo, I was obligated and compelled. Apparently, it was really interesting to watch play out over half of a year, but I got it all in one fistful.

See, DC Comics recently orchestrated an enormous, soul-shattering series of events that shook every DC hero and villain to the core. People dying, heroes disbanding and losing their powers, and generally depressing stuff flying all around. And then, they suddenly flash-forwarded all of their stories to a point one year later, and since this past May, they’ve been explaining the bizarre changes and the missing time in a weekly series called ‘52’, which again seems to be building up into another insanely huge crisis. This too will be collected, eventually, and I’ll try to catch up again. If you’d like a good jumping-in point, I’d try the Identity Crisis collection, and for all of the obscure characters that will pop up, I’d also suggest the enormous DC Comics Encyclopedia. It’s a worthwhile book to have to address how the characters might be related, though since the events of the Crisis, it’s probably gone a bit out of date. Does it sound unnecessarily difficult and complicated to need to keep track of a comic story with an encyclopedia? You’re not the only one who thinks so, so DC Comics will publish a Companion to help understand these events.

Don’t let that stop you, though. There are plenty of non-hero related graphic novels that deal with all kinds of subjects, often biographically. Jeffrey Brown deals with his relationships with women in tiny vignettes, in tiny books. Craig Thompson chronicles his first true romance in Blankets, which is a charmingly semi-epic and emotional exploration into love that actually, physically broke my heart. It was messy. And then there’s books like Cancer Vixen and Mom’s Cancer, which visually deal with telling the stories of people battling diseases. The classic Maus and Persepolis intelligently deal with living in war-torn countries.

Being a ‘comic’ doesn’t exclude something from being an intelligently executed work of literature, which is still a dominant perception in America. The pictures aren’t included to simplify a story, but to amplify and describe, and more often than not, to engage a viewer who might not have otherwise been so attracted by a page of words. Even more dominantly than that, the creator probably just needed to draw. So maybe you won’t be able to sell it later at a higher price, they’re good reads - something my five-foot tall stack of them will attest to. Comics like Gaiman’s Sandman have won genuine literature awards, and this week saw the publication of the very first Best American Comics 2006, from the very reputable Best American series of books. And if there’s any doubt about where to jump in, start at the beginning.