Don Asmussen

Donald Asmussen (October 31, 1962 – December 9, 2021) Early in his career, he published collages and celebrity caricatures in The New Yorker and drew a comic strip for Time called The Drawing Board; he worked on animations for his webseries "Like, News" which aired on Mondo Media throughout 1999-2001 and on the 2001 film Monkeybone.

At the Examiner, Asmussen started his first weekly comic strip, San Francisco Comic Strip. He later drew Super Average Joe and short comic strip serials for events he covered on location, including Republican Convention Comic Strip A strip by him ran in Time from 1998 to 2001. The strip was syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate. It was on hiatus from 2018 to 2019 during Asmussen's cancer treatment and last updated in March 2021.

In 2006, he published Dog vs. Cat: A Nation Divided, a satire of the 2004 presidential election.

In 2019, Asmussen collaborated with blogger Mary Ladd on The Wig Diaries, a collection of humorous essays about cancer by Ladd with illustrations by Asmussen.

Personal life and death Asmussen was married to Kelly Zito, a former reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. They had two daughters.

He was diagnosed with cancer in the mid-2010s, which recurred in 2018, including a brain tumor for which he underwent surgery. He died on December 9, 2021, at the age of 59.