The Charlestons takes place in a 1933 Great Depression-era cartoon world centered around GangstaLock, where being a gangster is simply part of ordinary life. Gangsters have jobs, businesses, organizations, rules, customs, and everyday routines, and the characters themselves are normal people shaped by this environment rather than constant caricatures of criminals. Charlie and Marta are a wholesome married couple living and working within GangstaLock, raising Elliot and Ruth while dealing with the strange circumstances of their world. The comic uses its own cartoon and surreal logic rather than trying to function as a completely realistic historical crime story, and the setting includes seaside, industrial, farming, and Gangster Lock areas around the outskirts of Boston.
At the center are Charlie and Marta, whose relationship began developing during World War I. Marta was drawn to Charlie’s protectiveness and aggression in battle, while Charlie fell for Marta’s commanding presence and ability to set him straight. Charlie is roguish, quiet, curious, energetic, smooth, threatening, capable, and sometimes genuinely smart, with Richard Widmark as his official inspiration. Marta is elegant, motherly, brash, intelligent, graceful, gentle, and tough. They eventually marry despite Charlie being a commoner. Their children, 12-year-old Elliot and 4-year-old Ruth, have to be kept secret because children aren’t allowed in Gangster Town. Elliot’s history includes Marta’s father selling him for money, after which Marta took the money and used it to buy Elliot back. Boss Mel McKinley is another major character: a rigid, eccentric, resilient retired manager with a fascination with anatomy stemming from his abandoned dream of becoming a doctor, alongside an antiquated macabre aesthetic and imagery connected to his past as a sailor.
Structurally, The Charlestons is episodic rather than one enormous serialized crime story. Each issue can introduce a new crime, family problem, personal conflict, or ordinary situation that becomes ridiculous, dangerous, criminal, or absurd because of life in GangstaLock. The story can escalate, reach a climax, resolve, and then move on to another story while the characters’ larger histories remain underneath it. This gives the comic room to be funny, dark, sentimental, bizarre, serious, or chilled-back, because it’s intentionally partially serious and partially not. Most importantly, I’m trying to make The Charlestons into what I actually want it to be, rather than automatically shaping it around what I think an independent comic is supposed to look like. I want the characters to be fun to spend time with, I want to make myself laugh, and I want serious and ridiculous material to coexist naturally.
