Although Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware were born nearly 20 years apart and work in very different milieus, they have a common bond as visionary storytellers who've stretched the limits of what comic books can do. First published in 1986, Spiegelman's Maus legitimized the notion of a "graphic novel"; besides being a searching memoir of growing up with Holocaust-survivor parents, the book's imaginative conceits and time-bending form reveled in the medium's potential. Spiegelman published Ware's work when the younger cartoonist was still a sophomore in college. A little more than ten years later, Ware produced Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, a sprawling work sometimes described as the Ulysses of graphic novels.