Constraining fields which are not the "primary" node

I'm making a custom list of nodes and their comments. I'd like to be able to both constrain the number of nodes (easy: Items per page refers to nodes in this case) but also constrain the number of comments displayed per node (e.g. the 5 most recent).

Is there any way of doing this in Views? It's easy enough to make a view which has the comments in and an argument to provide the node id, were it possible to include such a view inside another view, for example.

I'm brand new to all this, so apologies if it's an obvious question. I've googled it, but it's hard to know if you're googling the right thing when you've just started.

Any suggestions appreciated!

Rob