There was Steven Millhauser's "The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne," which was based largely on Winsor McKay, it seems to me.

There was also Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies, written by Tom De Haven, too. I'm afraid I have not read the book, yet, so I can't comment much on it.

Pretty sure Philip K. Dick's "The Zap Gun" has some fictitious comics - but it's been almost 20 years since I read it so I'm a *little* vague on the details.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zap_Gun

Ah, I found an excerpt from The Zap Gun - this is apparently a battery-powered 3D comic:

Before him lay the October 2003 copy of the uncivilized comic book, The Blue Cephalopod Man From Titan. At the moment, his lips moving, he examined the entertaining adventure, The Blue Cephalopod Man Meets the Fiendish Dirt-Thing That Bored to the Surface of Io After Two Billion Years Asleep in the Depths! He had reached the frame where the Blue Cephalopod Man, roused to consciousness by his sidekick's frantic telepathic efforts, had managed to convert the radiation-detecting portable G-system into a Cathode-Magnetic Ionizing Bi-polar Emanator.

With this Emanator, the Blue Cephalopod Man threatened the Fiendish Dirt-Thing as it attempted to carry off Miss Whitecotton, the mammate girlfriend of the Blue Man. It had succeeded in unfastening Miss Whitecotton's blouse so that one breast - and only one; that was International Law, the ruling applying severely to children's reading material - was exposed to the flickering light of Io's sky. It pulsed warmly, wiggled as Pete squeezed the wiggling-trigger. And the nipple dialated like a tiny pink lightbulb, upraised in 3-D and winking on and off, on and off ... and would continue to do so until the five-year battery-plate contained within the back cover of the mag at last gave out.

Tinnily, in sequence, as Pete stroked the aud tab, the adversaries of the adventure spoke.

Watchmen, itself a graphic novel of course, contains excerpts from fictitious comic 'Tales of the Black Freighter', a pirate-themed comic - Moore's reasoning was apparently that, faced with real-life (and rather unpopular) superheroes, people would want to read something else for escapism.

It's inspired by it, anyway :)

Dylan Horrocks' "Hicksville" imagine a small town where "sheep-farmers and fishermen argue the relative merits of early newspaper strips, while in the local bookshop and lending library obscure Mongolian minicomics share the shelves with a complete run of Action Comics." It's ostensibly about a comics journalist researching a biography for a Stan Lee figure, and frequently drops into embedded indie comics as well as pages from the imaginary "Captain Tomorrow" superhero comic. And cartography. Magical stuff.

http://www.hicksville.co.nz/hicksville.htm

--Ivan Towlson

Lest we forget, the "Eight page (or Tijuana) Bible," provided essential xxx counterpoint at every step of the toonway.

Picoult herself did a guest-stint on Wonder Woman about three years ago, so I'm not surprised she's a comics fan. I wonder if there are fake comics in any of Brad Meltzer's bestsellers.

I'm sure Stephen King has comics in some of his novels, but given King's technique of using real brands to cement his characters into the real world, I kinda doubt they'd be fake comics.

I'd totally chip in for that *grin*. --Ivan

The title character of Susan Daitch's novel The Colorist is a comic book colorist and the comic book she works on is vital to the book. And it is a very good book.

A recent example - Limbo in Jack O'Connell's The Resurrectionist:
http://www.enterlimbo.com/thebook.html
It's just out in paperback.

Patrik Nilsson

Johnny The Homicidal Maniac (by Jhonen Vasquez) draws a strip called Happy Noodle Boy within his own comic strip & sometimes discusses his creative process or comics he's working on.

and there is currently a manga - bakuman - that tells the story of 2 high school students who break into the manga world. The whole story revolves around the imaginary mangas that the students and their peers create and how they suceed or fail. The real manga - bakuman - appears in Shonen Jump. The fictional characters start writing for Shonen Jump and the manga they create appears in the fictional shonen jump that is portrayed in the real pages of Shonen Jump.

....and the cat riddled with worms chases his tail.....

Seth's WIMBLEDON GREEN: THE GREATEST COMIC BOOK COLLECTOR IN THE WORLD practically has as its raison d'être the creation of imaginary (invisible) comic book titles—it's great fun. And his IT'S A GOOD LIFE, IF YOU DON'T WEAKEN also plays with invisibility, though in a more serious register...

—Ed

In maybe fourth grade, I read The Teddy Bear Habit. Main character is a kid whose father draws a comic strip about, if I recall correctly, "Amorphous Man." Too long ago for me to remember details, but I know that the strip and its protagonist's adventures got into the book's plot somehow.

A character in the comic strip FoxTrot draws a comic strip called The Adventures of Slug Man and Leech Boy.

Al Capp had at least two in Li'l' Abner: "Fearless Fosdick" and "Sawdust," both parodies of other strips.

A friend who's an actual librarian recently sent me an e-mail on this very topic, noting some invisible comic strips that appear in early numbers of "Popeye."

He writes, "In the Thimble Theatre comic strip of July 9, 1933, Popeye is invited to invest his 5 million dollars in The Daily Blast newspaper, daily circulation 50,676,243. Soon he manages to have his sweetie Olive Oyl's picture run in the paper, which appears on the funny page along with the comic strips 'Pip the Gyp,' 'Zip the Dip,' and 'Boop the Doop,' [and a couple of others: '(something unrevealed) the Flop,' '(something unrevealed) Sad'] on July 22, 1933.

The next day he receives the a mysterious box that winds up containing (the introduction of) Swee'Pea!"

...then of course there's the sci-fi comic that Pierce remembers reading as a boy in the Aegypt books (I think as an adult he still has a compilation of it on his shelves that he pulls out in Deamonomania)...

There's J. Robert Lennon's "The Funnies," about the disgruntled family of a cartoonist who does a "Family Circus"-ish strip.
Tom deHaven's "Derby Dugan..." has been mentioned, but not sure if anyone's clarified that it's part of a trilogy, in which one strip character morphs over the ages...first as a Yellow Kid-style wiseacre (in "Funny Papers"...or maybe it's "Funny Pages"?...been a while and I'm too lazy to google it), then, as mentioned, an Orphan Annie-ian hero in "...Depression Funnies," and finally as a Crumb/Deitch/etc. '60s comix icon in "Dugan Under Ground." Would love to see DeHaven pick up the thread with a navel-gazing autobiographical '90s alt-comics variation. :)