Inverse - 💥 The Superhero Issue 2022

Monday

Oct 17 2022

At Inverse, we write about superheroes a lot. Like, every day, multiple times per day levels of a lot. But once a year, we like to take a step back and think about what superheroes really represent.

Superhero stories can still uplift us, challenge us, and inspire us. But they can also be deeply cynical (see Amazon’s The Boys, one of the best examples of the genre released this year).

In 2022, superheroes seem more vulnerable than ever. Marvel started to stretch itself too thin, and the studio’s underpaid VFX workers suffered as a result. Meanwhile, DC’s movie plans seemed to implode under the pressure of a corporate merger. It’s possible that 10 years from now, we’ll look at 2022 as the beginning of the end of superhero’s cultural domination.

With that in mind, join us this week as we explore the soft underbelly of the superhero phenomenon, starting today and running all week on Inverse.

What's New

Superheroes

Culture

How a Canadian rock band predicted Superman’s death

In 1992, DC Comics crossed a then-unthinkable line.

Clark Kent. Kal-El. The Man of Steel. Superman, the gold standard superhero and the fictional character mapped over the public consciousness as the ultimate Samaritan, would die.

After years of saving Metropolis from repeated destruction, Superman was felled by a new character, aptly named Doomsday, who donned gym shorts and a skullet. A fictional event so startling that it pierced the public zeitgeist, it was the first time I can remember comic books making the evening news.

But a year before Superman died in the comics, the Canadian rock band Crash Test Dummies eulogized him in “Superman’s Song” off their debut album, The Ghosts That Haunt Me. Describing Kal-El’s hypothetical funeral, lead singer Brad Roberts mourned in his signature baritone: “Sometimes I despair the world will never see another man like him.”

You’d think someone would have reached out to Roberts back when he managed to predict the Man of Steel’s demise, yet it somehow fell on this reporter to break the news three decades later.

Space

Science

NASA is scrambling to bring its planet-hunting telescope back online

NASA’s primary planet-hunting spacecraft has paused its search for alien worlds. This comes days after its most-recent data downlink.

On Monday (October 10), NASA’s TESS mission entered safe mode. While the telescope is believed to be stable, according to the space agency’s Wednesday (October 12) announcement, it means that science observations are suspended. NASA says recovery procedures are underway, but “could take several days.”

TESS’ full name — Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite — outlines how it has operated to detect more than 250 exoplanets (and thousands of candidates) so far.

As the four-year-old mission surveys stars, it watches for dips in brightness. If these blinks happen periodically, it’s a sign that a planet orbits a star and eclipses some of its light from Earth’s perspective when it passes in front.

Learn more

Detox

Mind and Body

Do you get stoned the first time you smoke weed? A doctor debunks a cannabis myth

The first time I smoked weed was pretty uneventful. I was about 15 years old. Many of my friends were already very well-versed in the art of smoking marijuana and they had a warning for me: I might not feel anything the first time.

“No one gets stoned the first time they smoke,” I remember my friend assured me. The anticipated effect would happen the next time I smoked, they told me. Being a 15 year old, I didn’t spend much time wondering why that might be. I took a few hits from a colorful glass bowl, coughed like my lungs were about to explode, and then waited. And waited. As my friends hoovered up a salad bowl full of Lucky Charms, I realized they were correct: This whole smoking weed thing — at least the first time — was pretty unremarkable.

Since then, other friends have shared a similar anecdote It seems to be a common experience to not feel the psychoactive effects of cannabis the first time you try it. So much so that there’s a (now archived) Reddit thread about why people don’t get high the first time they smoke, as well as assorted blog posts asking the same question. But how much truth is there to the claim?

Inverse spoke to Jordan Tishler, a medical doctor and founder and president of the Association of Cannabinoid Specialists, about the reality of first-time cannabis experiences.

BARIUM?

HE'S NOT EVEN DEAD YET

Astronomers find a heavier-than-expected element on giant hellworld

In 2021, WASP-76b made headlines as the most heavy metal exoplanet. The gas giant, bigger than Jupiter, orbits its star at a distance closer than Mercury — and astronomers suggested it was so hot it might rain iron. A similarly strange exoplanet, WASP-121b, is so hot and so close to its star that it’s warped into the shape of a rugby ball.

But iron is lightweight stuff compared to the unexpected results published in Astronomy and Astrophysics by a team led by Tomás Azevedo Silva and Olivier Demangeon from the University of Porto and the Portuguese Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço.

They found that in the two best-studied ultra-hot gas giants — WASP-121b and WASP-76b — swirl clouds of barium, a metal two-and-a-half times heavier than iron.

Inverse - 💥 The Superhero Issue 2022

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