Cartoonist Art Spiegelman says he was asked to censor Trump criticism in work

A Jewish cartoonist whose graphic Holocaust novel ‘Maus’ won the Pulitzer Prize has said he was asked to self-censor his criticism of Donald Trump from his introduction to a forthcoming book.

Art Spiegelman, 71, claims he was asked to stay “apolitical” by the Folio Society in the introduction to a book about the early days of Marvel comics, despite Marvel’s chairman having donated to hundreds of thousands to Trump’s election campaign.

In the offending paragraph, Spiegelman wrote about how “young Jewish creators of the first superheroes conjured up mythic – almost godlike – secular saviours” to address political issues of the 1930s and 40s.

He added: “In today’s all-too-real world, Captain America’s most nefarious villain, the Red Skull, is alive on screen and an Orange Skull haunts America.”

Spiegelman, who has compared Trump’s America to the years leading up to the Third Reich in Germany in the 1930s, said rather than make the required amends, he retracted the entire introduction and published it instead on The Guardian.

The Maus author suggested hypocrisy because Marvel Entertainment chairman, the US billionaire Isaac ‘Ike’ Perlmutter, has contributed to Trump’s campaign.

Spiegelman said Perlmutter was “a long-time friend of Donald Trump’s, an unofficial and influential adviser and a member of the president’s… Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida,” adding that Perlmutter and his wife both gave $360,000 each.

Trump was accused of stoking racial and ethnic tension last week by tweeting that he was considering naming anti-fascist organisation Antifa an “organisation of terror” just hours before a far-right rally in Portland.