USA Today announced this morning that the Superman strip from the much-anticipated Wednesday Comics anthology will also be appearing on the newspaper's website, launching with a full-page installment in the print version on July 8th. The strip, written by The Mask creator (and Hellboy-spinoff, BPRD writer) John Arcudi and drawn by The Joker artist Lee Bermejo, takes full advantage of the increased size of Wednesday's format (Each of the 15 strips in the anthology runs one of the 14 inch by 20 inch pages each week), giving Bermejo's art a chance to shine:

Wednesday Comics - which also features strips by Paul Pope, Neil Gaiman and Mike Allred, Kyle Baker, Dave Gibbons and Ryan Sook and many more - is also released on July 8th.

Superman to leap off these pages [USA Today]

That honor goes to Meyer's surprisingly decent alien-invasion romance The Host (read our review here), which clocked in at fourteenth. Although that does depend on how you count Watchmen, which soared all the way to number nine on the strength of anticipation for Zack Snyder's big screen adaptation after being only the sixtieth best-selling book of 2008.

The list, which tracks the best-selling books for the first three months of 2009, says sales of Meyer's five novels accounted for 16% of all books sold. That sounds even more impressive when you realize Meyer was responsible for one out of every seven books sold in the last three months. I think here is where I'm supposed to say whatever gets young people reading is a good thing - but I'm not entirely sure I believe it.

This continues the trend from 2008, where the four Twilight books swept the top of the annual list. That's something not even the Harry Potter books were able to do, although Meyer has a long way to go before she matches J.K. Rowling; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and its 44 million copies sold outstrips all the Twilight books combined. Even when you consider the 400 million Potter books include three more novels and a bunch of tie-ins, it still doesn't change the fact Rowling has Meyer beat by a factor of about five to one. (I'd also mention this decade's other historically massive best-seller, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, and its 57 million copies, but I'm trying to stay positive about this whole literacy thing.)

Looking over USA Today's 2008 list, the only other even vaguely science fictional titles beyond Meyer's books are Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse book Dead Until Dark, Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox, and Watchmen. Much as I love it, when Watchmen is the de facto standard bearer for best-selling science-fiction novels, it's safe to say that all of science fiction combined is no match for the Twilight juggernaut, and it's not even remotely close.

So what science fiction books are among the top-selling books of all time? There are really only two choices. As far as individual books are concerned, Frank Herbert's Dune is probably number one, with 12 million copies sold since its publication in 1965. As for science fiction series, that honor most likely goes to Isaac Asimov's original Foundation trilogy, which has sold a total of 20 million copies in its almost six decades in print. Well, at least there's some justice in the publishing world.

The Host fan art from Zuly89 on Fanpop.

[USA Today via SFScope]

USA Today, New Scientist, the awesome astronomy blog Bad Astronomy and the BBC and Nature and just about every sciency news outlet all have items devoted to the centennial. But they disagree on what the Tunguska Event was. USA Today calls it an "impact,' but Bad Astronomy says "air blast" and says there's no evidence anything hit the ground. New Scientist has posted a video in which their reporter circles Lake Cheko nearby the blast site in a helicopter and speculates whether it's the smoking gun of an impact.

What's going on here? Tunguska is probably the most heavily studied impact/air blast/space rock encounter on Earth and we know almost nothing about how it happened. It's also hard to say how likely it is that it will happen again, though one scientist's guess isn't comforting:

In terms of risk to Earth, astronomer David Morrison of NASA's Ames Research Center says a Tunguska-magnitude strike could happen once every two centuries and a bigger impact, a "civilization-threatening" million-megaton strike, could happen once every 2 million years. Even though astronomers have spotted more of these nearby asteroids in the last two decades, the estimated odds of an impact have actually declined, as Morrison notes in a May issue of NEO News, his asteroid newsletter.

If Morrison's right, we've got at best another century to learn as much as we can from Tunguska before another similar event hits home — maybe less. And in the mean time, we'll have plenty of close calls reminding us that we are basically sitting ducks unless we start doing something about one of the greatest threats to our survival as a civilization.