Ten Random Kleefeld Facts

It's been YEARS since I did my last "Ten Random Kleefeld Facts" so I thought I'd knock out another in lieu of writing an actual blog post.

1. My initial introduction to manga was via the First Comics editions of Lone Wolf & Cub from the late 1980s. I think I had read a dozen issues or so before I went back to read an introduction that noted they'd been brought over from Japan and were not only translated but had the pages mirror-flipped to accomodate left-to-right English.

2. I don't recall exactly when it happened, but sometime towards the end of last year, my personal collection of comics finally made it past 20,000. Currently, if you list them all out in alpha/numeric order, my 20,000^th issue is X-Men #73.
3. My first attempt at making a comic was nothing more than trying to re-create the story from Superman #274. I didn't have anything resembling even the remotest hint of talent relative to Curt Swan, so I did the story in the only style I was able to pull off at the time. It was drawn using the approach I'd learned in various Ed Emberley books, mostly Make a World.
4. One of my good friends in high school and I bonded over an appreciation of Judge Dredd. Except I knew the character primarily from the comics Quality was putting out in the mid-1980s, and he knew the character primarily from the Anthrax song "I Am the Law."
5. After I'd been collecting comics for a few years, I stumbled across a copy of Fantastic Four #76 for a reasonable (but not exactly cheap) price. I knew it was a hole in my collection, so I picked it up. After bringing it home and reading it, I started to file it away in one of my two long boxes... only to discover I already had a copy! But, as I pulled the issue out to stare at the apparent incredulity of having totally forgotten I had it, I found another copy behind that one! It would seem I had bought the issue, read it, forgotten about it, bought it again, (presumably) read it again, forgotten that I'd already bought it twice, and then purchased it a third time! That was the point when I realized I could no longer rely on my memory when hunting through back issue bins, and I had to start carrying a list around in my wallet. (Portable digital devices were still a solid 15-20 years away at that point.)
6. I've appeared as a character in a number of comics over the past ten years or so. Most recently, I showed up as a US Marshal in the first and second issues of The Catch by Steve Bryant and Ismael Canales. I think I'm slated to appear in the third issue as well.
7. The oldest comic in my personal collection is a very poor condition copy of Green Lama #5 from 1945. I found it about 15 years ago in a consignment shop for, like, two bucks.
8. The last time I wore a superhero costume for Halloween, I was five years old. It was a Ben Cooper Batman outfit.
9. I have seveteen Asterix books, about half of which were ones my father had bought in college. The other half were my father's as well, but he purchased those some years later; after I was born, but before I started "formally" collecting comics.
10. I was given a "special thanks" credit in a documentary about the infamous Roger Corman Fantastic Four film. The producer sent me a quick note once it came out saying as much and pointing me to a IMDB page he'd created for me. It struck me as odd, though, because it listed me as "Sean Kleefeld (II)" which I knew to mean there was another "Sean Kleefeld" already in the IMDB database. As far as I was aware, my name was wholly unique, so I went to check out this other Sean Kleefeld. It turns out someone else had created an IMDB page for me prevously, noting some "special thanks" credits I'd received in other comic-related documentaries! (I had IMDB merge the two entries and added a couple other similar credits.)

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