"I have to tell you one little anecdote about the family. I said my father brought his grandfather over from Russia. That’s how they did it in those days, they sent for the next one to come over. My father’s father had died at an early age in an accident. He never came to America. He died when my father was fairly young. But his grandfather was living and my father brought him over. He lived in Trenton. I never met him, because he died before I was born, but my eldest brother Harold, who was 17 years older, knew my great-grandfather.

"He lived to be 116. He was reputed to be the oldest man in New Jersey. They didn’t keep records nationally at the time, but he might have been the oldest man in the country, and maybe even in the world. It always fascinated me. I thought that the story of my great-grandfather was apocryphal, but one of my cousins sent me an article from a Trenton paper, about 1911, that had a whole-page interview with him. Sure enough, it was a year before he died. He was only 115! He was still living alone, mind you. Took care of himself. When they came to the house to interview him, he was in the backyard chopping wood for the wood stove. He did a little jig for them. One of the questions, which fascinated me, was they asked him what was his earliest memory as a child growing up in some rural village in Western Russia. He said he remembered there was a big event in the village. Everybody ran out to the road — probably just a dirt road then — because there was a big parade. What was it? It was Napoleon on his way to Moscow. This is 1812. So my brother knew the man who saw Napoleon."

I pointed out to him that the VERY FIRST IMAGE of the Joker seen in the comics showed him without the smile!

It would have to be either Mr Byrne's Joker as he appeared in the Superman series or Marshall Rogers / Terry Austin's Detective Comics run for me....Terry's inks seemed to bring an edge to Rogers' pencils that inkers like Dan Green (e.g. on Dr Strange) could not.

John's Joker seemed way more threatening though!