In 2015, after six writers refused to sit on a panel at the PEN American Center in protest of the planned "freedom of expression courage award" for the satirical French periodical "Charlie Hebdo" following the shooting at its headquarters earlier in the year, Spiegelman agreed to be one of the replacement hosts, along with other names in comics such as writer Neil Gaiman. Spiegelman retracted a cover he had submitted to a Gaiman-edited "saying the unsayable" issue of "New Statesman" when the management declined to print a strip of Spiegelman's. The strip, "Notes from a First Amendment Fundamentalist", depicts Muhammad, and Spiegelman believed the rejection was censorship, though the magazine asserted it never intended to run the cartoon.