Marvel Comics wants to steer clear of politics. Even in the introduction to an anthology spanning the period of time during and immediately after World War II.

Marvel: The Golden Age 1939-1949was originally supposed to include an intro penned by Art Spiegelman, the famed graphic novelist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on Maus-- a personal story about the Holocaust, featuring a cast of cartoon animals. But now Spiegelman claims that the essay he wrote, which refers to Donald Trump as the "Orange Skull" -- a reference to Captain America's Nazi nemesis, Red Skull -- didn't fly with Marvel.

Spiegelman wrote in The Guardianthat after he submitted his essay in June, the anthology's publisher Folio Society informed him that Marvel Comics "is not allowing its publications to take a political stance." He says that he was told the intro would still work if he just removed the Red Skull reference.

(Mashable reached out to both Marvel Comics and the Folio Society for comment, but neither had replied at the time of publish.)

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Spiegelman declined and reclaimed his essay, which The Guardianpublished in full on Saturday. The whole thing is worth your time, but this passage, in which Spiegelman draws links between the modern world and the devastation of WWII, is presumably the one Marvel had a problem with:

Auschwitz and Hiroshima make more sense as dark comic book cataclysms than as events in our real world. 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. International fascism again looms large (how quickly we humans forget – study these golden age comics hard, boys and girls!) and the dislocations that have followed the global economic meltdown of 2008 helped bring us to a point where the planet itself seems likely to melt down. Armageddon seems somehow plausible and we’re all turned into helpless children scared of forces grander than we can imagine, looking for respite and answers in superheroes flying across screens in our chapel of dreams.

It's important to point out here: Spiegelman has the profile that he does largely because of Maus.Asking him to leave modern politics out of an essay about a period of history when comics were directly influenced by the rise of fascism is like asking Trump to stop being racist. It's not gonna happen.

Spiegelman concludes The Guardian's printing of his essay with a couple of extra paragraphs directly addressing what happened with Marvel and the Folio Society. He said that while he didn't think what he had written was particularly controversial, politically speaking, the pushback from Marvel helped him realize "that perhaps it had been irresponsible to be playful about the dire existential threat we now live with."

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The essay ends with a direct reference to Isaac Perlmutter, the Marvel chairman and former CEO who is a well-known Trump supporter. Spiegelman points out the Marvel exec's connections and financial contributions to the U.S. president before ending with this:

"I’ve also had to learn, yet again, that everything is political... just like Captain America socking Hitler on the jaw."

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TopicsActivismComicsDonald Trump

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