Two Paintings: Dagwood (C.207) returned to the comic-book source material of Lichtenstein's earliest career — Dagwood Bumstead, the hapless domestic husband of the long-running Blondie comic strip — and placed him within the Paintings Series' structure of depicted paintings within a print. The comic strip character, now elevated to the subject of a depicted painting hanging on a wall, underwent the same process of cultural transformation the series had been examining throughout: the mass-cultural image converted into art object through the mechanism of the frame and the gallery context.

The Dagwood reference was a deliberate return to origins. Lichtenstein had built his reputation on the examination of comic-book imagery in the early 1960s, and by 1984 those works had themselves become canonical — exhibited in major museums, reproduced in textbooks, absorbed into the history of twentieth-century art. Two Paintings: Dagwood (C.207) placed a depicted painting of that imagery within the Paintings Series, asking what it meant that the comic-book character had made this journey: from the newsprint of the Sunday supplement to the canvas of a painting to the frame of a gallery wall to the subject of a print. The layers of transformation were themselves the subject.

The woodcut and lithograph combination gave the work a physical character suited to its examination of paint and canvas — the woodcut marks carrying the grain of their source material in the same way that the depicted paintings carried the evidence of their own processes. Two Paintings: Dagwood (C.207) was the most autobiographical work in the series and, in its quiet self-examination, one of the most revealing.

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