 Maus looms large not only over Spiegelman's body of work, but over the comics medium itself. While Spiegelman was far from the first to do autobiography in comics, critics such as James Campbell considered Maus the work that popularized it. The bestseller has been widely written about in the popular press and academia — the quantity of its critical literature far outstrips that of any other work of comics. It has been examined from a great variety of academic viewpoints, though most often by those with little understanding of Maus's context in the history of comics. While Maus has been credited with lifting comics from popular culture into the world of high art in the public imagination, criticism has tended to ignore its deep roots in popular culture, roots that Spiegelman has intimate familiarity with and has devoted considerable time to promote.
