A syndicated comic strip has been discontinued by a Pennsylvania newspaper after an obscene anti-Trump message was found hidden in one of its panels.

The offending cartoon showed a bear called Leonardo Bear-Vinci assembling a flying machine, with sketches similar to Leonardo da Vinci’s. The drawings include mostly illegible scrawled notes, but in the corner one of the scrawls reads: “We fondly say go fuck yourself to Trump.”

Some of my sharp-eyed readers have spotted a little Easter egg from Leonardo Bear-Vinci. Can you find it?



Non Sequitur for February 10, 2019 | https://t.co/ITjGIYyfyN https://t.co/fDHpxSmAgo via @GoComics — Wiley Miller (@TheWileyMiller) February 10, 2019

The strip was an edition of Non Sequitur, a comic created by cartoonist Wiley Miller, which is printed in more than 700 newspapers. It has been running since 1992 and is better known for genteel political satire.

Today’s comic, for example, shows an older couple whose cats have taken up the whole sofa. The wife says to her husband: “They’re dug in on their position … unless you can open a can of tuna.” The caption reads: “Averting a border crisis.”

This will be news to readers of the Butler Eagle, a conservative family-owned local paper in Pennsylvania, as the comic was missing from Monday’s edition.

The publisher and general manager, Ron Vodenichar, was incensed about the bear cartoon, writing on the paper’s website: “We apologize that such a disgusting trick was perpetuated [sic] on the reading public … The Butler Eagle will discontinue that comic immediately.”

If Vodenichar had checked Miller’s Twitter feed, he might have been more prepared for his four-letter missive. He tweets regularly and angrily about Donald Trump. On Sunday Miller wrote: “Still waiting for President Fuckwit to name even one member of congress, in either house, who advocates for open borders.”

The Butler Eagle was not the only newspaper to carry an unexpected anti-Trump message on Sunday. The Grammys did their best to avoid political controversy, but eagle-eyed viewers spotted a prop newspaper in Camella Cabello’s performance with that carried the front-page headline “Build bridges not walls”.

Trump can take some solace in the fact that not every hidden message is attacking him. Last year Hasbro were forced to apologise after one of their Transformer dolls was revealed to have spelled out “Maga” in Cybertronian language. They claimed one of their vendors had inserted the design without authorisation.