Far-Out Frisco

Anyone arriving late for Don Asmussen’s book reading must have felt like a kid who wandered into the wrong class on the first day of school. On a slide projector, the goateed 32-year-old artist displayed the cover of a mock Learning Annex catalog: “How to Be a Successful Artist Like Me.” Then he threw underwear at the audience. He held up cue cards for the humor-impaired (“Satire,” “Almost Satire”).

He provided tips on landing a job at the Examiner, where he draws the popular, wickedly subversive, generically named “San Francisco Comic Strip”--”They’ll pretty much hire anyone” and “Don’t dress like a cow and suggestively rub your udders against the art director.” For the finale, he passed out purple veils (napkins, really) and pudding (“If there’s not enough for everyone, you won’t die”) and promised to sign books.

Then he took questions. What is your ancestry? someone asked. “Danish,” he said. “I’m really into the art of my people.” Are there any Danish performance artists? “I think,” he replied dryly, “Karen Finley has a little Danish in her.”

The only thing Asmussen takes seriously is humor. But is parody possible in San Francisco? New Yorkers are famous for their self-loathing; Angelenos, infamous for self-absorption. But San Franciscans? Like Narcissus, San Francisco long ago looked at its reflection in the bay and decided that it liked what it saw. As Ovid put it: “I burn with love of my own self.”

And The City, as the Examiner capitalizes it, is never chary in declaring its feelings about itself. “The Best Place on Earth,” a local news station proclaims several times a day. When, a few years before his death, the city gave Herb Caen a day in his honor, the columnist proclaimed: “If I do go to heaven, I’m going to do what every San Franciscan does who goes to heaven--he looks around and says, ‘It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.’ ”

Don Asmussen is Herb Caen on acid, only with more hair. Every Sunday the sardonic cartoonist holds up a fun house mirror to his adopted city, bending the already bizarre local goings-on into a crazed universe where cafe denizens find nose rings floating in their mochas, the city decides to market its red light district as “Tenderloinland: A Theme Park for Children,” and the annual Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Parade is led by the real-life Dykes on Bikes but followed by the more fuel-efficient “dykes who carpool” and trailed by an elderly and confused Dick Van Dyke decked out in leather and studs.

“It’s almost like a diary of the city,” Asmussen explained during a beery interview. Indeed, a caller to a radio show told Asmussen that he gets most of his local news from the comic strip--the first year of which was recently published as “The San Francisco Comic Strip: Book of Big-Ass Mocha” (Russian Hill Press).

Before his death in February, Caen tipped his fedora to the strip. “One of the most outrageously funny and original features to come along in years,” he wrote. But many readers are merely outraged. “Bitter and ill-tempered,” “vulgar and vicious” and “beyond parody to cruelty” are a few of the darts.

Lighten up, Asmussen says. “This is a city that’s nuts, but it’s sensitive to everything,” he says. “All the groups in San Francisco have their Nazi qualities, wanting everyone to agree with them.”

A good “SF Comic” has the thematic density of a “Seinfeld” episode in its ingenious, interlocking allusions. “The Great Gator Hunt,” for example, was based on a silly competition between the Examiner and Chronicle newspapers to catch an alligator that was sighted in a local lake. The resulting strip careens through a gauntlet of jokes about: the Examiner’s “name the gator” contest; a gator hunter hired by the Chron; baboon organ transplants; cruelty to animals (the hunter reads the Chron society column to the poor reptile); Manny the Hippie from the Letterman show (who is eaten by the gator, which leads to a joke over the medical marijuana controversy); and includes a cameo by Asmussen’s boss, Examiner Editor Phil Bronstein, who is represented by a gerbil with a mustache.

Asmussen’s panels are crudely drawn, heavy on text, bursting with jokes. “I figure if I throw six jokes out there,” he said, “one is bound to be good.”

A typical strip combines disparate news items, pop cultural references (Bob Denver of “Gilligan’s Island” fame shows up frequently) and an absurdist worldview into a diorama straight out of De Chirico. A spate of head-on collisions on the Golden Gate Bridge and demands for a traffic barrier are conflated with the mayor’s idea to police public transit with street gangs and turn into a cartoon in which a line of knife-wielding thugs separates traffic on the bridge.

A proposal to legalize prostitution mutates into a strip about hookers selling monthly passes like the bus system. And a straight couple getting ejected from a gay bar for kissing in public becomes a look forward to a time when the city’s heterosexuals are a colorful minority who get profiled in the paper and the word “straight” is hijacked by militant heteroes who launch a magazine dedicated to the controversial practice of “in-ning” celebrities. “I’ve never seen so many nuts,” Asmussen said. “The social scene here is years’ worth of material.”

And it’s very far from Rhode Island, where he grew up. When he was 4, he saw “Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang” at a drive-in and returned home to draw out the story line on 1,000 pieces of accounting paper he got from his father, a CPA. He advanced from stick figures to the Rhode Island School of Design, where he was inspired by the acid-inflected drawings of illustrator Ralph Steadman. He bounced from papers in Detroit to San Diego and finally landed in San Francisco about 18 months ago as a staff artist. “Newspapers are cool,” he said.

Soon mordant cartoon birthday cards Asmussen created for his co-workers began to be tacked up around the office, prompting Bronstein to suggest that the artist give a strip a shot.

“This is the only paper I can think of where I could get away with the strip,” he said. “What’s killing a lot of newspapers is that they can’t take chances and be outrageous.”

For someone who never took much interest in cartooning, Asmussen has embraced the genre with a passion that belies his general slouching posture of detachment. He created an anti-strip called “The Hero Santon,” about the ironic non-adventures of a television-watching superhero who lived for four months earlier this year on the cyber pages of Salon magazine (the Examiner paid him to stop). He draws Web.boy for Web Magazine, and he’s launching a more broadly satiric strip in the Examiner that he is hoping to syndicate. Called the “Mr. Kitty Show,” it’s about a dog who disguises himself as a cat because feline strips have better demographics.