The Captain Underpants books frequently feature comics based on the title character created by George Beard and Harold Hutchins. Almost every book begins with George and Harold presenting a comic providing exposition on the series up to that point. The Super Diaper Baby spinoff books have the entire books in the same comic format.
Watchmen includes excerpts from the autobiography of one of the characters, as well as interviews with various others. Watchmen also includes the meta-comic Tales of the Black Freighter which is drawn by an artist who is missing throughout the story.
X-Men Noir has Bolivar Trask's sci-fi pulp series The Sentinels. For bonus points, the original series featured chapters from The Sentinels as back-ups.
Punisher Noir has Frank Castelione, Jr.'s favorite radio drama, The Punisher.
Iron Man Noir has Marvels: A Magazine of Men's Adventure, a pulp magazine featuring the (heavily fictionalized) exploits of Tony Stark as written by his friend Virgil Munsey and, later, Pepper Potts.
'Mazing Man's friend Denton Fixx writes comic books. His Zoot Sputnik stories appear in a few issues of 'Mazing Man.
American Flagg! ran Bob Violence (a popular In-Universe animated show) as a backup feature for several issues.
Spider-Man's former wife Mary Jane was an actress in a soap opera called Secret Hospital for a while. (Her character's name was "Sybil Shane" and from what we saw of the show (which was very little), her character seemed to be a vixen of sorts, and the show pretty much had every soap opera stereotype included.)
In one issue of The Sandman (1989), Shakespeare and his actors perform A Midsummer Night's Dream for Oberon, Titania, and numerous members of the fairy realm. Since, as noted above, A Midsummer Night's Dream already contains a Show Within a Show, this makes the play about Pyramus and Thisbe a show within a show within a show.
Animal Man's wife Ellen used to be the artist for a parody of The Punisher called The Penalizer. This gets a Mythology Gag in The New 52, where it's their son's favourite comic book.
In Supreme, Ethan Crane and Diana Dane are the creative team on Omniman, a fictional character who is even more like Superman than Supreme is. The same company also publishes Warrior Woman.
A Bronze Age Superman story from Action Comics #429 where he fought a creature named Ozymaxias, a man/plant monster from ancient Earth, turned out to be Superman using a creative writing exercise to learn how the Daily Planet's morgue keeper had learned his secret identity.
The post-Crisis Superman graphic novel Under A Yellow Sun paralleled Clark Kent's titular novel with his Superman activities, with many of the characters in the book being based off people or events he knew. A plot point was that the hero of the novel made choices Clark wouldn't, such as joining the Luthor analogue when offered a job, and eventually realizing his mistake and atoning for it.
As of the latest volume of her series (Mighty Captain Marvel, from 2017), Carol Danvers has been saddled with one of these. In a disbelief-straining setup, she's been told that the production of the loathsome fictionalized TV show about her, "Cap'n Marvel," is vitally important to funding her Alpha Flight team. Thus she's forced to be a technical advisor and even allow the show to film on her space station.
As part of his Ultimate Iron Man mini-series for Marvel Comics' Ultimate Universe, Orson Scott Card had Tony Stark's entire flesh mutated into neural tissue while in womb due to an accident, which also granted him regenerative abilities. This reimagining of the character was considered so off-the-wall that all other Iron Man stories in the Ultimate universe resolved to ignore it entirely, and eventually Mark Millar officially retconned it out of the Ultimate Universe's continuity, establishing instead that the events from Ultimate Iron Man were part of a pseudobiographical cartoon of the same name produced by Tony Stark himself. The cartoon was extremely successful, being sold in eighty-seven territories and getting tons of merchandise.
Superboy (1994): Superboy, Dubbilex, Tana, Roxy and Rex watch the pilot of a Superboy cartoon Rex Leech had made. Tana correctly predicts that no-one will pick it up for syndication and Superboy and the rest make a few snide comments about the fact that the show made Rex the main character, and made him much more upright, better looking and likeable than the real Rex.
Transmetropolitan contains three examples of TV-shows about the protagonist, gonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem: Animesque edutainment show Magical Truthsaying Bastard Spidey, a nameless overblown action-thriller showing a hilariously Hollywood-ized version of the events of the first album, and a Porn Parody titled "I Hump It Here". It is worth mentioning that while Spider (or rather, a in various ways heavily Flanderized version of Spider) is the protagonist of all these shows, he was not actually involved in the production, and is distraught at the idea of "becoming television".
Wonder Woman #161: Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor get involved with the production of a film about "the Curse of Cleopatra" after the stars are attacked by the WW villain Countess Draska Nishki
In Volume 2 Diana writes an autobiographical book called Reflections and goes on a book tour.
In Volume 3 one of Diana's enemies tries to produce an infuriatingly bad "biographical film" about Wonder Woman and the Amazons. When Diana is brought in to get her to sign off on the production she refuses and has a fight with the villain. Considering the circumstances the film is never completed.
In Truly Tyler Emmie and Tyler collaborate on a comic called Up in the Attic that they work on together for art class.
Strikeforce: Morituri uses multiple versions of this trope. For this case, the protagonists' exploits are featured in television shows based on their adventures, and they participate in a press junket with the actors portraying them.
Characters are fans
In the comic book Young Justice, the characters watched a TV show called Wendy the Werewolf Stalker, a parody of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Eventually Cissie King-Jones (Arrowette) guest-starred in an episode after becoming famous during the Sydney Summer Games. This show is also brought up in Superboy (1994) and Robin (1993) since Kon, Tim and Stephanie are fans.
In the Super Mario Bros. comic books, Mario is a huge fan of comic-book-within-a-comic-book Dirk Drain-Head, which is hated by the other good guys (including Luigi, who ironically looks exactly like Dirk), but loved also by Bowser's minions.
One issue of Hack/Slash has Cassie and Vlad battling a slasher at a comic book convention; needless to say, there are a few comics within the comic. The most significant one, Wunderkind, is a blatant Captain Ersatz of Captain Marvel.
Al Capp's classic comic strip Li'l Abner had the comic-strip-within-a-comic-strip ''Fearless Fosdick'', which was a parody of Dick Tracy that became almost as popular as Li'l Abner itself. Later Capp did a similar parody of Peanuts called Pee Wee.
Justice Girl is a comic within a comic in The Maze Agency (and, in universe, spawned a short-lived TV series). jen was a huge fan of Justice Girl when she was younger.
Hawkeye: There's a running gag in Hawkeye (2012) #6 concerning a show called "Dog Cops", which is apparently a very popular program among members of the Avengers. We know nothing about it except that one of the characters is "Sergeant Whiskers", but its existence has occasioned manic speculation among fans to the point where fan art exists.
In Paul Chadwick's Concrete, the title character enjoys watching "Sky of Heads", an in-universe TV show about an afterlife where the heads of the deceased float around aimlessly and tell each other stories about their former lives. At one point, Concrete wonders: "If I showed up there, would I have this head, or my old human one?"
A few issues of Green Lantern in the Kyle Rayner days mention that Kyle used to be a fan of a comicbook character called the Cannoneer. One splash page shows that the Cannoneer is a cross between Cable and Shatterstar, drawn in a parody of Rob Liefeld's style. He used to be a member of a group called the Y-Contingent, who are presumably equivalent to X-Force.
The anthropomorphic comic Rocketship Rodents (itself a parody of Buck Rogers) has its own Doctor Who Show Within A Show parody called Professor Chronofur... And as it's an anthropomorphic comic, you probably know where it leads.
She also writes fanfiction for Magical Pony Adventures and Super Heroes (which in the Marvelverse would mean Real-Person Fic).
The 80s (fake) space opera porn film Captain Hammer Meets the Space Vixens shows up twice in Lesbian Zombies from Outer Space: the first couple pages of Issue #1 come directly from the show within the show, until we pull out and find Ace watching porn in the back room of a video store; and later in Issue #4, Ace finds Mr. Hagerty watching the same porn video in the auditorium of the local high school.
One issue of Xombi opens with the cast discussing a film they just saw - which, based on the plot and cast details mentioned, is 'Habeas Corpus', the film within a film from The Player.
Frank Miller's RoboCop, based on Frank Miller's original RoboCop 2 script, not only features MediaBreak but also the talk shows The Luke Spindle Show and Lilac, the respective eponymous hosts being a homophobic and misogynistic Smarmy Host and a transgendered woman. The latter show is also used to introduce Margaret Love, the character who'd become 2's Juliette Faxx.
Show is plot point
A show-within-a-comic plays a pivotal role in Ronin (1983).
In The Tale of One Bad Rat, Helen imagines herself finding a lost book by Beatrix Potter, The Tale of One Bad Rat, which is told and drawn in the style of Potter's books.
Silverblade: While bits and pieces of Jonathan Lord's filmography are seen throughout the series, The Silver Blade gets the most attention, with multiple scenes being shown on the pages. Brian Vane's superhero TV show The Winged Avenger also gets a fair amount of attention. Becomes a major plot because Jonathan is granted the power to become any character he ever portrayed on film, and he most commonly assumes the role of Silverblade. The Executioner possesses Brian's Winged Avenger costume and gains the powers of the Winged Avenger.
Strikeforce: Morituri uses multiple versions of this trope. In this case, issue #1 includes excerpts from a promotional comic book about the first team of Morituri volunteers. When Harold Everson considers joining, his briefing includes watching a video of what really happened to them.
There are several in the comic Y: The Last Man. The Last Man is a play written and performed by the Fish & Bicycles acting troupe (Yorick, the real last man, is not happy to discover that the play ends with him dying). The same people are seen several years later (unsuccessfully) trying to make an action movie about the radical man-hating Daughters of the Amazon, then finally end up creating a successful comic series about the last woman on Earth (Yorick is equally unimpressed with it). And when the protagonists are in Japan they watch traditional Noh theatre featuring a demon called Hitogoroshi (Manslaughter).
There's an actual Marvel Comics company that produces licensed comics based on the real-life adventures of the heroes. This started as early as Fantastic Four #10, January 1963. The She-Hulk series uses these in-universe comics in the title character's legal cases. DC Comics, after abandoning Earth-Prime, took this idea into their own canon.
Amusingly, since in most cases the superheroes themselves gain licensing money and are actually somewhat involved in the comic's production, it's implied that the in-universe Marvel comics are slightly more skewered to portray the heroes in a better light than our real-world versions of the same comics. The heroes themselves usually answer the fanmail in the comics, too, which leads to some really odd things being said — like Reed Richards wanting to get rid of fashion and force everyone in the world to wear a Fantastic Four-style uniform.
At one point, the Marvel Universe Marvel Comics company hired a new artist for their Captain America comic... named Steve Rogers.
While some heroes, like the aforementioned She-Hulk and Fantastic Four, are public figures in the Marvel Universe, others, like Spider-Man or Daredevil, aren't about to spill their secret identities on newsstands, so their comics-within-a-comic are only accurate as far as the superheroics go, and make up the heroes' personal lives and origin stories out of whole cloth.
Marvel once printed a series of one-shots, called 'Marvels Comics' which were supposed to be the comics that exist in the 616 universe.
Watchmen also has Tales of the Black Freighter, a dark pirate comic (since superhero comics didn't catch on in a world with real superheroes, pirate comics became common instead) which is used as a metaphor for various parts of the story and the characters' plights.
Daniel Clowes' comic David Boring has the protagonist find "The Yellow Streak," a one-shot comic by his father that seems to suggest why his parents divorced, while individual panels are used in the main story to suggest David's reactions.
In issue #17 of Matt Fraction's Hawkeye, the main character watches a TV special, which parallels his life, featuring the "Winter Friends," a group of super heroic animals (an analogue to the Avengers), including a non-powered dog who wants to take matters into his own hands (analogue to Hawkeye), who has a fellow canine friend who supports him (analogue to Kate Bishop), as well as three super-powered allies (analogues to Mockingbird, Spider-Man and Black Widow), and a group of tracksuit dogs (analogue to the "Tracksuit Draculas").
Played with in The Multiversity; various comics that superheroes in alternate realities are fans of reflect the events of the story ... because they're recording actual events in other universes that are affected.
The idea has a long history with DC, dating back to the Silver Age, where the comics of the main DC universe reflected what was going on in Earth-Two, where DC's Golden Age characters lived. (However, for the period when there was no DC multiverse, they went with Marvel's solution, as mentioned above.)
In the Doctor Who (IDW) Twelfth Doctor book, a creative team was inspired by vague rumours of a time-travelling Doctor to create Time Surgeon, a comic about a punked-up version of Twelfth and his companion Kara, travelling in a Time Cabinet and fighting the Minister and the Deathroids with his sonic scalpel.
Detective Comics #622-624 deals with Batman trying to figure out who is behind a group of murders who is using a Batman comic as an inspiration. The comic in question takes a lot of liberties over Batman and other figures, turning most of them into demons.
Strikeforce: Morituri uses multiple versions of this trope. Within the story, government propagandists produce Comic Books featuring glorified versions of actual events, while television shows use film from actual battles as "green-screen" backdrop and stock footage for fictional dramas.
, which was a parody of Dick Tracy that became almost as popular as Li'l Abner itself. Later Capp did a similar parody of Peanuts called Pee Wee.