An ambitious objective in the development of self-lubricating wear-resistant coatings is to make use of lubricious phases such as graphite, amorphous carbon or MoS2 incorporated into coatings. A series of (Ti,Al)(N,C)coatings with different carbon contents (0 -28 %, mole fraction) were deposited by reactive magnetron sputtering of TiAl in a mixture of Ar, N2 and CH4 gases. The microstructure and constitution of these coatings were investigated using EPMA, AFM, XPS, (HR)TEM, Raman spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction. Starting from a pure TiAlN coating significant changes in the microstructure of the coatings were observed dependent on the carbon concentration. Under optimum conditions nanocomposite coatings with a structure of a coexisting metastable hard, nanocrystalline fcc (Ti,Al)(N,C) phase and an amorphous carbon phase were deposited. The localization of an amorphous carbon phase was shown by HRTEM.