Newspaper drops syndicated comic strip after hidden ‘go f— yourself’ to Trump

A Pennsylvania newspaper has discontinued a syndicated comic strip after a cartoon published Sunday included a hidden insult to President Trump.

The Butler Eagle’s publisher and general manager, Ron Vodenichar, said that the paper was alerted by a reader to the hidden message in the “Non Sequitur” cartoon.

{mosads}“We apologize that such a disgusting trick was perpetuated on the reading public,” Vodenichar said on the paper’s website. “The Butler Eagle will discontinue that comic immediately.”

One panel of Sunday’s “Non Sequitur” cartoon, which encouraged readers to color it in themselves, appears to include the hidden message: “We fondly say go f— yourself to Trump.”

Here is the image of the Non Sequitur comic strip.
With the oh-so clever Trump insult pic.twitter.com/rlHwKqbHFj

— Fran Warren (@FranWarren) February 11, 2019

Vodenichar said that the hidden message was “apparently placed there by someone in the creative department of the creator of the comic strip or the syndication which controls it.”

He noted that the paper did not have an “opportunity to remove it even if they had discovered it before distribution.”

The cartoonist who drew the strip, Wiley Miller, acknowledged in a tweet that there was a “little Easter egg” from the cartoon’s character, Leonardo Bear-Vinci.

The comic is published in more than 700 newspapers in the U.S., according to USA Today.