As a young man I used to sit cross legged on the floor of Pink's Drugs reading comic books on Newport Blvd in Costa Mesa reading the comic books.

As a young man I used to sit cross legged on the floor of Pink's Drugs reading comic books on Newport Blvd in Costa Mesa reading the comic books. 

I couldn't buy them so I sat there while the old men were in the back room with their 'bookie."

When I could buy them I would wait until I had three and then go over to the old book store on 18th st by Lion's Park and trade them in for one comic book that I hadn't read yet. Sgt Nick Fury and the Green Lantern along with Thor were among my favorite ones.

"The Telegraph reports that Professor Carol Tilley, a professor of library and information science at the University of Illinois, says that comics are just as sophisticated as other forms of reading, children benefit from reading them at least as much as they do from reading other kinds of books, and that there is evidence that comics increase children's vocabulary and instill a love of reading.

 A lot of the criticism of comics and comic books come from people who think that kids are just looking at the pictures and not putting them together with the words,' says Tilley.

But you could easily make some of the same criticisms of picture books – that kids are just looking at pictures, and not at the words.'

Tilley says that some of the condescension toward comics as a medium may come from the connotations that the name itself evokes but that the distinct comic book aesthetic — frames, thought and speech bubbles, motion lines, to name a few — has been co-opted by children's books, creating a hybrid format."

"Science Daily reports findings from a new study which suggest that infants begin picking up elements of what will be their first language in the womb, long before their first babble or coo, and are able to memorize sounds from the external world by the last trimester of pregnancy, with a particular sensitivity to melody contour in both music and language.

Newborns prefer their mother's voice over other voices and perceive the emotional content of messages conveyed via intonation contours in maternal speech (a.k.a. 'motherese').

The dramatic finding of this study is that not only are human neonates capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their fetal life, within the last trimester of gestation,' said Kathleen Wermke of the University of Würzburg in Germany.

 Wermke's team recorded and analyzed the cries of 60 healthy newborns, 30 born into French-speaking families and 30 born into German-speaking families, when they were three to five days old.

 The recordings of 2,500 cries as mothers changed babies' diapers, readied babies for feeding or otherwise interacted with the youngsters show an extremely early impact of native language, with analysis revealing clear differences in the shape of the newborns' cry melodies, based on their mother tongue."