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127 4 Fictional Minds in Comics 100 Bullets, Characterization, and Ethics The comics series 100 Bullets opens on a rainy street with the words “Bang. You’re dead” (1:5). The premise is simple: an agent offers an attach é case of one hundred untraceable bullets and an unregistered gun to people who have been wronged in life. Equipped with the evidence the agent supplies, they have carte blanche to take their revenge. After the opening statement of “Bang. You’re dead,” the series spends the remaining one hundred issues of its run exploring the moral and ethical implications of firing or not firing that lethal bullet. The series can be read as a negotiation of ethics in the postmodern world. That world is marked by a contingency of moral values—100 Bullets represents this through a wide-ranging conspiracy setting in which individual moral choice is meaningless and through the absence of any reliable moral guidance in the ethical thicket of the fictional world. As the story of 100 Bullets unfolds and as readers accompany different characters’ attempts to deal with this contingency, they learn that in order to establish the identity of a fictional mind and its sense of self, (personal) commitment is necessary . Choices have to be made, even in the postmodern world, and these choices, and the motivations and commitments behind them, are what defines a character. This assessment of moral choices is developed on different levels in 100 Bullets. This chapter explores the ethical dimension in contemporary comics storytelling through 100 Bullets and examines how the series creates fictional minds, establishes symbolic value systems, and projects the moral progress of individual characters in the postmodern world. 4.1. Thought Experiments in Philosophy and Comics Storytelling In the story “Shot, Water, Back,” a man named Lee Dolan is handed one of the attaché cases. Agent Graves identifies a certain Megan Dietrich as the woman who smuggled child pornography onto Dolan’s comput- 128 Fictional Minds in Comics er, which cost him his career as a promising restaurateur, his marriage, and the affection of his children. The story sets up the basic thought experiment of the attaché case: will Dolan use the gun and kill Dietrich? Yet this raises the question of how far the fictional narrative 100 Bullets can be considered to be a thought experiment, and how the comic fills the structure of the thought experiment by presenting the complex interactions of fictional minds and their social constraints. Some obvious similarities suggest that 100 Bullets is akin to the philosophical thought experiment. Like Plato’s “Ring of Gyges” (2007, 43–44) and Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion” (1971), 100 Bullets proposes an ethical dilemma that is highly unlikely to occur in the real world. What would you do with a ring that made you invisible? Would you disconnect and thus kill a famous violinist who is plugged into your circulatory system? Would you kill someone who ruined your life if you were certain to get away with it? As a heuristic tool of philosophy, the thought experiment is “controlled speculation” (Sorensen 1992, 8) about a particular problem. Based on a series of hypotheses that usually create a bizarre scenario, it makes a particular philosophical point about epistemology , ontology, or ethics (see Sorensen 1992). 100 Bullets shares many of these features of the thought experiment: Agent Graves’s attaché case poses a particular problem, it implies a series of hypotheses (the misfortune in one’s life is attributable to another person, one should hold the person responsible for this, and killing is the appropriate way of doing so), and it creates a constructed, if not bizarre, scenario in the fictional world of 100 Bullets. In order to see how 100 Bullets departs from philosophical thought experiments as such, let us compare it to Thomson’s thought experiment on abortion. In her essay “A Defense of Abortion,” Thomson introduces the argument that a fetus is a person and therefore should not be killed. Note that this implies a stark moral choice: abortion is presented as the murder of a person. “But now let me ask you to imagine this,” she writes. “You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood...

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