There was another one in Dick Tracy called “Sawdust.” The cartoonists for these strips were shown as incredibly effete hippies, a la Andy Warhol’s Factory. I think these early 70s strips were around the end of Chester Gould’s “lucid” period, followed by lots of bizarre storylines on the Moon or featuring Tracy flying around the city in some weird wastebasket-looking contraption.
Another DC comic, 'Mazing Man, has a strip written by one of the protagonists and drawn by Fred Hembeck. It’s called “Zoot Sputnik” and it features a dim-witted hero and his immediate family in tame superhero adventures. The cast is inexplicably in a different historical era every time they appear.
Oh, also: “The Black Freighter” from Watchmen. Inspired by The Threepenny Opera, this dreaded ship and its crew have turned up again in the most recent League of Extraordinary Gentlemen storyline.
Funnily enough, this week a Swedish comic called Medelålders Plus has a short arc about their TPB appearing at the Göteborg Book Fair, and how the two main characters think they’re being completely misrepresented.
It’s not an extraordinarily funny comic, kind of a blander version of “Sally Forth” once Hilary moves out and they retire. With the occasional oblique dick joke, nudity, and/or toilet humor because you can get away with that in the Swedish dailies.
The Fusco Brotherslike to admit they are in a comic strip
Tom The Dancing Bug often runs a Super-Fun-Pak Comics
They have some situational awareness that they’re in a work of fiction, but not necessarily a comic book. Elan knows that the world works along dramatic principles, and how to manipulate that to his own ends. The others occasionally make reference to being characters in a Dungeons and Dragons game. I think Haley is the only one who ever works the “characters in a comic strip” angle, such as when she stole the diamond from herself by breaking into the cast page, or when Tsukiko’s lightning bolt blew her through the panel border.
The classic Sam’s Strip was about nothing but comics. Every strip had a reference of some nature to well-known comic strips (with characters from the dropping in) or the conventions of the genre (when the strip rented out a couple of its panels to an adventure strip). It ran in the early 60s.
One other time, as well. Schroeder played a note on his piano, and listened intently. Excited, he ran to Charlie Brown, and said, “Charlie Brown, I think I’ve got perfect pitch!”
Charlie Brown was sitting in a beanbag chair, chilling out. His response was: “You mean a perfect pitch. And who cares, baseball season is over, anyway.”
Schroeder walked away, glumly, muttering to himself: “I wonder if I can request to be transferred to another comic strip.”
Bender, after coming out of the programming to like robot 1-X, paraphrased “Wait, if that wasn’t real, how can I know that any of this is real? Isn’t it possible, nay probable that this is just the product of my or someone else’s imagination?”
This strip features massive 4th wall breakage, but the final panel really illustrates some awareness that they are in a comic. There’s a couple other examples, but that was the one that stood out in my memory. In OOTS, it’s mainly side characters like the demonic cockroaches and those jellyfish-like creatures who constantly break the 4th wall.
I hate to be a snob, especially since I used to do a web comic, but including web comics in a thread of 4th-wall breaking cartoons is like asking for a list of drinks that are wet. We could rattle off hundreds of web comics that have addressed the audience directly, or made references to the fact that they are in a comic strip, etc.
Peanuts also had a comic strip where a disgusted Schroeder says "I’ll think I’ll apply for a transfer to a new comic strip
Which is really by Bil Keane in the style of what he thinks a child would draw.
Right - and again, of the main cast, it’s Haley who’s aware they’re in a comic.
