Social Media Cartooning: Visual and Multimodal Metaphors in Iraqi Newspapers Cartoons

The current study aims to investigate the visual and multimodal metaphors by the use of metaphorical elements in cartoons that focus on social media networking. thirty-two cartoons, drawn by well-known cartoonists, are gathered from the iraqi newspapers. they were selected and classified based on their themes. all the details of these cartoons are taken into consideration. they are analyzed and interpreted using the metaphorical concepts based on lakoff and johnson’s (1980) conceptual metaphor theory. then, they are analyzed by using forceville’s (1996) pictorial metaphor and sobrino’s (2017) multimodal metaphor approach. the findings reveal that the cartoons showed different visual/ pictorial and multimodal metaphors. they addressed different themes in satirical manner. in conclusion, the verbal text played a crucial role to make the multimodal metaphors dominant in the gathered cartoons that are relevant to social media.