To tell this fictionalized story, Ruillier said he collected and assembled “the accounts of undocumented immigrants and their families, as well as police officers and other people close to the issue” with the help of a friend who works with the France-based advocacy network, Réseau Éducation Sans Frontières. These experiences are the book’s anchor. Drawing from his background as a children’s author, Ruillier cast the world of The Strange with an assortment of talking bipedal, winged, and water-bound animals going about their lives like human beings. A spectacled hippo, for example, works the front desk of a detention center, while the central character is a stocky, dispirited-looking canine. The result is a polyphonic portrait told primarily through the eyes of those who have crossed, or somehow altered, the protagonist’s path. While some portrayals are predictable (rhinos and gorillas play the parts of officers), the accompanying text leaves room for the unexpected. Not everyone who appears benign is, and every moment of contact is fraught.

This portrait is necessarily limited in scope, since those who tell the central character’s story have only ever known him as a “strange.” Each new account thus further fractures his identity. He is simultaneously a scapegoat, helper, thief, family member, illegal subletter, day laborer, not from here, and in need of help. Someone unable to intervene and define himself. We never really learn, in fact, what prompted his decision to leave. Ruillier disrupts any impulse on the part of the reader to make judgments, to think from the perspective of a fictional country’s courts. As a note from Amnesty International at the end of the book affirms, this vagueness allows the story to strive for a degree of universality.

Threaded throughout the graphic novel are the rallying voices of politicians (Ruillier quotes Nicolas Sarkozy, Manuel Valls, and Marine Le Pen in the section breaks) and media commentators who, using recognizable tactics, seek to taint how the locals perceive a growing population of “stranges” during an election cycle. Repeating what she heard on the radio, for instance, one neighbor eyes the protagonist suspiciously in the elevator and assures herself that she has “every right” to turn him in. “They’re just here,” she continues, “to poison the lives of honest people.”

Though The Strange’s plot is relatively linear, the varied, incomplete, and shifting points of view refract the protagonist’s story. He is always on the move and frequently disappears from sight. While a crow might follow him to a building in the North End, the part of town where all of the “stranges” live, it is a middleman character who informs readers what happens next, as he guides the “strange” to his sublet. No single character knows or discloses too much. By employing this narrative strategy, Ruillier illustrates the way an immigrant’s story of departure and arrival is rarely straightforward.