Incognito, Book 1: Perfect Victims by Grégory Mardon

This book is supposedly the first of a series, but I can find no record of further books - and the book itself seems to be solidly self-contained. So I'll note that this is apparently first in the "Incognito" series while not being quite sure if there ever was a second.

Incognito, Book 1: Perfect Victims is a psychological story - not quite a thriller, but fairly dramatic - from French creator Grégory Mardon. It was originally published in 2005, fairly soon after his book Body and Soul (which is in a similar vein), but not translated for English-language publication until 2017 (by Joseph Laredo).

Jean-Pierre is a young man in the big city - he feels invisible, unnoticed, forgotten, completely neglected. So much so that he believes he is actually invisible, or can be at will. (We see him try to do this, but mostly in his imagination; the book doesn't really give credence to his theory.) He uses this, as far as we can see - again, we think mostly in his imagination - to peep and stalk women he finds attractive but thinks will or do completely ignore him. (This part of the set-up reminded me a lot of a movie from almost exactly the same era, Cashback.) This imagination may be more like hallucinations, possibly - it's never quite clear what is real, what is in his head, and how it comes about.

During one of these ill-advised excursions - this one actually happening in the real world, after a night of drinking with a friend - he tries to climb the side of a building to get to a woman he sees in a window, his intentions unstated. He falls; he does some serious damage to his leg; he wakes up in the hospital.

And that lets us meet the other two characters of this three-hander. He was found and brought to the hospital by Berenice, a physical therapist who lives with her wheelchair-bound brother Ambroise. Jean-Pierre will need a physical therapist, and he's attracted to Berenice, so he hires her to start therapy once he's out of his cast. Meanwhile, we see her at home with Ambroise, who is a self-loathing, and her-loathing, monster who is verbally abusive almost every moment of the day, with a sadistic sexual edge to his comments: he insists she is always having sex with multiple men, every time she leaves the apartment, and eventually demands she bring one of them home so he can watch.

And that's what plays out in the end: Jean-Pierre asks Berenice out on a date at the end of his therapy, and they go see Suspicion (I guess Rear Window would be too on-the-nose with the wheelchair-bound Ambroise), then go to a café, and then, inevitably, back to her place.

She initiates sex, and Jean-Pierre...well, goes into one of his fugues, I guess. He does not have a healthy view of women: I can say that definitively. The Ambroise plot - there's some vague talk that he may have meant to kill Berenice's sex partner - doesn't end as expected, either.

And Jean-Pierre ends the book as he began it, with a new injury - to a different part of his body (and not that one) - and wandering through the streets alone.

This is a moody, odd, quirky story, populated by obsessives. Well, the men, at least. Berenice seems to be fairly level-headed, for all the good that does. One possible moral is that "all men are crazy," which I wouldn't expect from a male creator, but it does fit. Mardon's art is similarly moody and atmospheric, though he packs a lot of fairly small panels onto his pages to get through this dialogue-filled story.