Does comics belong to literature? Literary substance of comics

At first, the thesis describes the question of the "literary substance" of comics and how czech comics theory has dealt with it. Although the theory claims now that comics is not a part of literature, there is no scholarly reflection of this point. In the second part of the thesis, comics is compared to literature from three different points of view: the autenticity of the artwork, the use of verbal language, and the artifact (work of art as an object). Nevertheless, it shows that literature and comics cannot be compared clearly: comics is an autographic two-stage art dealing with spatial parameters of writing and with a book as its artifact; literature is an allographic one-stage art and its artifact is (virtually) sound. The last part applies some approaches of literary theory (narration, narrator, poetics, reception, reader etc.) to comics. In spite of the mutual incomarability, comics could be analysed with the instruments of literary theory but it depends on how much the theory deals with the primary substance of literature, i.e. language