الفهرس 
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Abstract
The postmodern world has been increasingly visual that visual reading has enjoyed unprecedented popularity. Generally, postmodernism refers to an ongoing school of thought, philosophy, or movement that has started in the aftermath of World War II. The term is also used to describe certain features of post– World War II literature, in particular. It opened the doors for a completely new manner of thinking, of perceiving things, and can be thought of as a movement that emphasizes that “there is a better world than the modern one”. (Lemert 22) Of the many types of visual statements or narratives such as: memes, caricatures and graffiti, comics stands out as particularly complex in terms of definition and usage.
Postmodernism offers a different approach to understand literature. Unlike previous literary movements, there is no unified aesthetic, hierarchy, or set of values that unite postmodernists. However, what postmodernist writers have in common is the rejection of the norm and the desire for change. Their emotions of mistrust, disillusionment, self-awareness, and irony are evident in their writings more than ever before. Postmodernist writers express these outlooks on life through merging many features, including but not restricted to hybridity, deconstruction, irony, intertextuality, historiographic metafiction, nonlinear narratives, different and unreliable narrators, and a tendency towards scattering chaos in opening and closure.
A grounding feature that is often connected with postmodernism is hybridity. Thanks to Postmodernism that embraced diversity and destroyed all traditional norms, comics became acknowledged as literature. As the classical script of a narrative, where words were the only means to deliver a story, was supplemented by alternative hybrid means. Comics’ word-image hybrid script was approved to successfully tell a story and create literature, Chute described comics as ”a hybrid word-and-image form in which two narrative tracks, one verbal and one visual, register temporality
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spatially”. (452) Thus, comics offers hybrid narrative that involves the reader to put the pieces together and decide what the authors want to say.
Another cornerstone of Postmodernism is deconstruction. Terry Eagleton defines deconstruction as “a critical operation by which binary oppositions can be partly undermined or by which they can be shown to partly undermine each other in the process of textual meaning”. (132) Thus, it comes as no surprise that postmodernism shook the founding principles of comics, especially Superhero comics. It is noted, “The superhero was a problematic figure.” (Williams and Lyons 35) Postmodernism successfully deconstructed the superhero myth, as the prefix, super, indicates something superior or extraordinary – the binary opposite of inferior or ordinary. It is suggested, “This deconstruction…demythologizes the superhero myth by placing it at the center of a web of conflicting perspectives that uncovers its historicity”. (Kukkonen and Wood 163) Initially, superhero comics represented good versus evil, then, they were about the failing of superheroes, and the process of getting back up as “being a hero means doing the hardest thing of all ... being the best person you can be.” (Kenson 16) Finally, the myth of ideal superheroes was deconstructed as superheroes became “neither hero nor villain”. (Booker 489)
One more feature of Postmodernism is the use of irony. It is noted, “Irony is when the unexpected occurs or when the opposite is intended.” (McCracken 10) Irony is a bedrock in postmodernism and a significant feature in the postmodernist narrative that depends on the readers’ engagement and their comprehension of what they read, see or even feel. Once the readers detect the ironic perception proposed in the narrative, they begin to deduce ironical interpretations that vary from one reader to another. As it is assumed, “It is the reader’s simultaneous presence and his traditional ontological absence from the text which, because it also reflects upon the author’s own textual status, underscores the ironic tension specific to the postmodernist literature.” (Ziegler 290)
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Intertextuality is important to postmodernism because it challenges the idea that every text is original and separate from others. Instead, postmodernist works included references or parallels to other works because they believe that every text is born because of the preceding ones. According to French critic Roland Barthes, a literary work is “a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.” (146)
In addition, historiographic metafiction, which, as the name suggests, is the perfect combination between metafiction, where text is aware that it’s a text, and historical fiction. Bear in mind that this feature almost usullay accompanies the intertextuality feature. Canadian literary scholar Linda Hutcheon coins the term historiographic metafiction stating, “The term postmodernism, when used in fiction, should, by analogy, best be reserved to describe fiction that is at once metafictional and historical in its echoes of the texts and contexts of the past. In order to distinguish this paradoxical beast from traditional historical fiction, I would like to label it ‘historiographic meta-fiction.’” The purpose of historiographic metafiction differs from one text to another. However, writers employ this feature to claim historical events and people and make them their own. Sometimes, it is to tell a suppressed truth about history and retell it without the optimism and systemic constraints of previous movements. (3)
Another postmodern feature is the involvement of different and more likely unreliable narrators who may manipulate the reader’s perception and try to gain their sympathy. It is claimed that the mingling between different narrators rather than one particular narrative voice exposes “the conflict between the narrator’s repot of the ‘facts’ on the level of the story and the interpretations provided by the narrator”. Thus, it is deduced, in postmodernism, “The narrative not only informs the reader of the narrator’s version of events, it also provides him or her with indirect information about what presumably ‘