Rolf, Lance, Al, and Lars, as well as Axel.

Hm, according to my friends over at Righteous Dudes and Cats w/ 'Tudes I'm the defacto defender of the worth of the Fusco Brothers. And as that I can make no defense for the strip. I thoroughly enjoy it, but wouldn't know what to say to those who don't. The humor of the Fusco Brother's is so consistent and bland that it is either the worst comic on the page or (where my opinion would fall) the best. If anything it is one step beyond Garfield in the meta-comic scale of funny w/ out being explicitly a meta-comic (like say Pearls Before Swine).

In trying to read Fusco Brothers' comics online I realized that they're really not funny out-of-context. I can't read them outside of the comic page, the demand that they be funny w/o being treated within the rest of the comic page is too much to bear. But this is probably true of most of the comics on the page. Well, let me retract that. There are some comics that make sense outside of the comic page (in collections, on the web, by themselves) such as Calvin & Hobbes, For Better of For Worse or Get Fuzzy, but others that do not, Garfield, Blondie, Beatle Bailey or The Fusco Brothers (and maybe even Peanuts). That may seem like a debate about genre, episodic vs. serial debate (w/ outliers like Peanuts having elements of both - an episodic serial?) and maybe it is. The difference in genre for Fusco and Garfield makes them much more difficult to talk about because there is no real story or string or development instead you have to talk about the nature of the humor/comedy in order to validate the comics worth. What you see in one strip is what you get. And I'm not going to try (and fail) w/r/t the Fusco Brothers.

That all said I think the Fusco's work because of this and not in spite of this. That's what it's all about. It's funny because of it's awareness but not in a way that is kooky (Zippy) or overly self-aware (PBS). It's as confused about the nature of its humor as I am.

And it has a wolverine.