In a city where anything can happen, one wrong turn can be murder. Some of my favorite writers, people like Warren Ellis, Kurt Busiek and Alan Moore, use this technique in a powerful manner. They take the basic concepts of heroes and legends, then break them into accessible terms for the readers. Somehow, they manage to do this in ways that are original, startling and always intelligent. I decided that if I had to follow anybody's cues when creating a series for Shotgun Press, I was at least going to follow the cues set by the best.
Genre is as much about the setting as it is about the characters.
Consider a city like New York, where each borough has its own distinct flavor from Queens to the Village. Consider also Indianapolis, where Speedway is different from Carmel as Greenwood is different from Broad Ripple. And so on. You'd have horror, science fiction, fantasy and crime, just to name a few. Ideally, you could tell any kind of story you ever wanted to in a setting like that.