Fans of Marvel Comics' ongoing Dark Reign storyline will be happy this week. In addition to Dark Reign: The List - X-Men, there's also Dark X-Men: The Confession (which, in the mighty Marvel tradition, ties into Dark Reign, X-Men and the recently completed Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Utopia) and Dark Reign: Made Men, which looks at what's happening for the villains not in the center of Norman Osborn's scheme to villainize America.

For those who prefer a brighter Marvel Universe, Joss Whedon's entire X-Men run gets a collection in the Astonishing X-Men Omnibus. And the X-Men Origins hardcover brings together some beautifully illustrated retellings of the earliest days of the mutant franchise. Spider-Woman #1 is the paper version of the motion comic, but the oddest release from Marvel this week is Pet Avengers Classic Vol. 1, which offers up an anthology of stories about Marvel's Mightiest Pets. Yes, really.

DC aren't the kind of publishers who'd pull a lame stunt like pet superheroes (Well, apart from the Legion of Super-Pets, and Krypto and Streaky and, okay, never mind). DC would much rather pull lame stunts like phone votes to decide the fates of long-running characters, and in the DC Comics Library: A Death In The Family hardcover, you can relive that bold, classy experiment that ended with Robin being blown up by the Joker. Prouder moments of classic comics get collected in the first volume of Flash Chronicles, reprinting (again) the first appearances of the Silver Age Flash. And the Push trade paperback collects the comic book prologue that was much better than the movie it tied into.

Luckily, and unusually, the two best books of the week are both single issues, allowing you to sample both before running back in a month for seconds. (And they're openings of mini-series, so you don't have to worry about making a long-term commitment.)

Superman: Secret Origin lets Geoff Johns and Gary Frank go to town on the Man of Steel, taking six issues to tell the story of how a baby rocketed from a dying planet could grow up to make the tights and cape combo work in a way that will doubtless entertain and hint at what's to come in the character's future.

Underground brings together the obscenely talented Jeff (X-Men First Class, Agents of Atlas and countless other wonderful books) Parker and Steve (Whiteout, which I promise is better than the movie) Lieber for a series that makes up in adventure and fun what it lacks in science fiction. Check out a preview of the first issue here to be convinced.

As always, all of these books and more can be found on the official Diamond shipping list for the week, and your local comic store can be found using your friendly neighborhood Comic Shop Locator. Just promise us that you'll believe that a man can fly and go underground all at the same time, huh?

Andreev combines (illegally taken) photos of the Moscow Underground with other images to create portraits of gloomy horror. Some of the photos suggest the subway system (one of the oldest and deepest in the world) is a hotbed for arcane mystical activity, others seem built on urban legends of gigantic insects making their homes in the tunnels, and still others are straightforward science fiction, with the daily commute supervised by watchful robotic overlords.

The Horror of Subway [English Russia via Environmental Graffiti]

The lab is on a site that used to do physics research, and was a gold mine before that. The current Sanford Lab, in collaboration with the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL), is the deepest underground lab in the world. It's divided into three levels: the shallow lab, the mid-level, and the deep campus. The deep campus is 6 and a half Empire State Buildings deep, or around 8,000 feet.

Experiments are already underway at the 5,000 foot level, but the lab intends to run its dark matter experiments as deep as possible in a lab called the Xenon detector experiment, or LUX. Doing the experiments deep inside the earth isn't just a demonstration in mad science; it's also a way to keep out interfering cosmic radiation.

The effects of dark matter in these experiments are so minuscule that any interfering radiation could throw off any experiments done at ground level. To get any real data, these experiments require a lot of shielding. Thousands of feet of earth should do the job just fine.

This $550 million project should be up and running by 2016. And soon after, it'll probably make it's SyFy channel debut as the site of a big-budget underground disaster movie!

Sanford Lab dedicated 4,850 feet underground [Sanford Lab, via Physorg]

(Top image: a 3D map of the universe's dark matter, from NASA, ESA and R. Massey. Bottom image: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation)