Cartoonist Wiley Miller hid a vulgar anatomical instruction to Donald Trump in this ‘Non Sequitur’ comic strip

At first glance, Sunday’s Non Sequitur comic strip just showed bears dressed up like Leonardo da Vinci.

The syndicated strip opens with Bear-Vinci holding a picture of a Virtruvian Bear. It ends with the ursine artist painting a Mona Lisa, who is also, you guessed it, a bear. They’re all characters in the “Bearaissance”, and the format invites readers to colour in the drawings.

But much like da Vinci himself, Wiley Miller, whose work often tackles politics and has occasionally drawn controversy, could not resist inserting a secret message into his latest work. Hidden at the bottom right corner of the second panel, beneath a drawing of the Italian inventor’s flying machine, a semi-legible scribble appeared to read, “Go f*** yourself Trump.”

The Butler Eagle, a family-owned newspaper north of Pittsburgh that syndicated Non Sequitur, decided to pull the strip on Monday after an irate reader alerted the newspaper.

Harry’s View: selected works by the SCMP's veteran political cartoonist, Harry Harrison

“One of our readers has a young daughter who reads the comics. This family sits down with this comic and they stumble across this hidden message,” Ron Vodenichar, the paper’s publisher and general manager, told The Washington Post.

He said the newspaper has been publishing the comic for a few years, and received Non Sequitur in a package with other syndicated comic strips that was already laid out. The decision to pull the comic, Vodenichar said, was about the profanity and “has nothing to do with who it was aimed at.”

According to the comic strip’s publisher, Andrews McMeel Universal, Non Sequitur goes out to more than 700 newspapers.

Andrews McMeel declined to comment. However, the message in the second panel appears to have been erased from the cartoon by Andrews McMeel on its Go Comics site.

Unlike Sunday’s message, Miller’s political opinions are no secret. He frequently criticises US President Donald Trump on his Twitter feed and his comics often carry an obvious political message. A July 2016 comic depicted a character wearing KKK robes emblazoned with the message, “I’m with Trump.”

Miller declined to comment. But on Sunday, he teased the “Easter egg” in the Non Sequitur comic on Twitter, inviting people to look for the message.

This is not the first time a cartoonist has come under scrutiny for their political work in the Trump era. Last year, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette fired editorial cartoonist Rob Rogers, who had been critical of the president in his work. The move earned a rebuke from Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, though a spokesman for the Post-Gazette insisted that the firing had “little to do with politics, ideology or Donald Trump.”

Old Master Q comic exhibition celebrates Hong Kong humour

Non Sequitur won the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year in 2014. Launched in 1992, the comic has gone through several iterations since.

“I developed the strip to go into any direction my creativity would take me,” Miller said in a 2014 interview. “[It’s] very open-ended. It’s like creating a new strip all the time.”

“I’m always trying to push things,” when it came to his art form, he said. “I haven’t had to apologise yet.”

But Miller has faced controversy before for his work. In 2010, some newspapers decided not to run one of his cartoons depicting Mohammad, the founder of Islam.

“All I can do is surmise that the irony of their being afraid to run a cartoon that satirises media’s knee-jerk reaction to anything involving Islam bounced right of their foreheads. So what they’ve actually accomplished is, sadly, [to] validate the point,” he said at the time.