The master’s thesis examines auto-reflexivity and auto-referentiality in comics and explores how these phenomena are established within a verbal-visual, sequential, and spatially organised medium. Self-reflexivity refers to a work’s reflection on its own production, expressive strategies, and conditions of creation, while self-referentiality denotes the devices through which a comic refers to its own form, materiality, or fictional status. Drawing on narratology, literary theory, and comics studies, the thesis analyses selected works by Adrian Tomine, Gašper Rus, Gašper Krajnc, Anna Haifisch, Scott McCloud, Matt Madden, Satoshi Kon, and Moebius. The analysis demonstrates that self-reference in comics appears in autobiographical and autofictional representations of comic artists, portraits of fictional artists, formal-didactic metacomics, and works structured around ontological and metaleptic transgressions. The distinctive nature of auto-reflexivity in comics emerges through panel arrangement, the relationship between words and images, the materiality of the page, and the movement of characters and authors across narrative levels.
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