Muñoz, Chéri Samba, Joost Swarte, Yoshiharu Tsuge, Jacques Tardi, and others. With the intention of creating a book-length work based on his father's recollections of the Holocaust Spiegelman began to interview his father again in 1978 and made a research visit in 1979 to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where his parents had been imprisoned by the Nazis. The book, Maus, appeared one chapter at a time as an insert in Raw beginning with the second issue in December 1980. Spiegelman's father did not live to see its completion; he died on 18 August 1982. Spiegelman learned in 1985 that Steven Spielberg was producing an animated film about Jewish mice who escape persecution in Eastern Europe by fleeing to the United States. Spiegelman was sure the film, An American Tail (1986), was inspired by Maus and became eager to have his unfinished book come out before the movie to avoid comparisons. He struggled to find a publisher until in 1986, after the publication in The New York Times of a rave review of the work-in-progress, Pantheon agreed to release a collection of the first six chapters. The volume was titled Maus: A Survivor's Tale and subtitled My Father Bleeds History. The book found a large audience, in part because it was sold in bookstores rather than in direct-market comic shops, which by the 1980s had become the dominant outlet for comic books. Spiegelman began teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1978, and continued until 1987, teaching alongside his heroes Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner. ": An Idiosyncratic Historical and Aesthetic Overview", a Spiegelman essay, was published in Print. Another Spiegelman essay, "High Art Lowdown", was published in Artforum in 1990, critiquing the High/Low exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. In the wake of the success of the Cabbage Patch Kids series of dolls, Spiegelman created the parodic trading card series Garbage Pail Kids for Topps in 1985. Similar to the Wacky Packages series, the gross-out factor of the cards was controversial with parent groups, and its popularity started a gross-out fad among children. Spiegelman called Topps his "Medici" for the autonomy and financial freedom working for the company had given him. The relationship was nevertheless strained over issues of credit and ownership of the original artwork. In 1989 Topps auctioned off pieces of art Spiegelman had created rather than returning them to him, and Spiegelman