A Pennsylvania newspaper has halted a syndicated comic strip after a cartoon published on Sunday included a hidden insult to President TrumpDonald TrumpArizona GOP asks court to overturn vote-by-mail system McCarthy slams GOP members who spoke at white nationalist conference: ‘Unacceptable’ First jury trial against defendant starts riot from January 6 MORE.
Butler Eagle publisher and managing director Ron Vodenichar said the paper was alerted by a reader to the hidden message in the “Non Sequitur” cartoon.
“We apologize that such disgusting stuff was perpetuated on the reading public,” Vodenichar said on the newspaper’s website. “The Butler Eagle will immediately interrupt this comic.”
A panel from Sunday’s “Non Sequitur” cartoon, which encouraged readers to color it in themselves, appears to include the hidden message: “We lovingly say fuck off Trump.”
Here is the image from the Non Sequitur comic.
With Trump’s clever insult pic.twitter.com/rlHwKqbHFj— Fran Warren (@FranWarren) February 11, 2019
Vodenichar said the hidden message was “apparently placed there by someone in the creative department of the comic’s creator or the syndication that controls it.”
He noted that the newspaper did not have “the opportunity to remove it even though they discovered it before distribution”.
The cartoonist who drew the comic, Wiley Miller, acknowledged in a tweet that there was a “little Easter egg” of the cartoon character, Leonardo Bear-Vinci.
The comic is published in more than 700 newspapers in the United States, according to USA Today.