Aaron and Ahmed by Jay Cantor (writer) and James Romberger (artist)

Aaron and Ahmed is subtitled ‘A Love Story’, but it’s not that simple. It’s the story of Aaron, who becomes a soldier in Guantanamo Bay after his girlfriend dies in the attacks on the World Trade Centre, and Ahmed, one of the inmates who he interrogates. It’s unlikely that these two men would ever bond in real life, and in truth the script never gets over this difficulty.

The early section of the book usually has Aaron cast as a surrogate for the reader, as he is lectured by a prison scientist, and then Ahmed, about their respective viewpoints. All of this exposition nearly kills the story, but these sections are informative, and Romberger’s excellent images, slightly overlit like smuggled-out film, get the reader through. Sadly, this all builds up to an escape from Guantanamo to Pakistan that’s too jarring to believe, and what follows becomes more unbelievable still. Aaron is trained as a suicide bomber, then a mystical angle is explored, and this leads to a final twist that’s just too removed from what’s come before to be at all believable. The art, and some of the argument, makes the book worth a look, but this could have been so much better.