An eighteen-year-old fan, Stephanie Burgess, recognizes some of the places in downtown Houston in the drawings.

STEPHANIE BURGESS: "Looking through this was pretty cool because I see some of the buildings, they look pretty familiar."

Debbie Cook is a comic book fan and a fourth-grade teacher. What does she think of children spending time reading comic books?

DEBBIE COOK: "Reading is reading, whatever you can do to get them to be better at reading, understanding -- I encourage them to read anything they can."

Christopher Yost is the author of the Scarlet Spider series. He points to the many popular summer movies based on characters from comic books.

CHRISTOPHER YOST: "I think comic books are the new mythology, and if you look at movies and video games, so many of the big summer blockbusters are based on comic books."

Mr. Yost sees many possibilities for storylines set in Houston.

CHRISTOPHER YOST: "Houston felt like a good place because, A, it is a place the Marvel universe have not seen before, and, B, with its proximity to Mexico and its proximity to the Gulf, it has a lot of new opportunities."

We have a video about Scarlet Spider in Houston at voaspecialenglish.com.

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BARBARA KLEIN: Our program was produced by Brianna Blake with reporting by Dan Kraker, Mike O'Sullivan and Greg Flakus. I'm Barbara Klein.

STEVE EMBER: And I'm Steve Ember. You can find English teaching activities along with program transcripts, MP3s, podcasts and PDF files for e-readers at voaspecialenglish.com. Join us again next week for THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English.