Critic Joseph Witek sees the shifting between different modes of traditional comics representation at times presents a literalist view through "windowlike panels", and at others "representational, symbolic, allegorical, associative, and allusive", an approach analogous to "Binky Brown's massively and chaotically overdetermined subjectivity". Witek finds roots for the fractured psychological landscape of "Binky Brown" in the comics of earlier eras: the unrestrained psyches in the dreams of Winsor McCay's "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend", the irrational, shifting landscapes of George Herriman's "Krazy Kat", and Superman's obsessively contrarian nemesis Bizarro.