Eisner Nominated ‘Banned Book Club’ Creators Speak Out on Canceled Book Tour

Ryan Estrada and Kim Hyun Sook

Ryan Estrada and Kim Hyun Sook, whose Banned Book Club was nominated for a 2021 Eisner Award, have cancelled a planned four-month trip to the U.S. because of concerns about Kim’s safety. The couple, who are married, live in South Korea. Estrada is an American citizen. Kim is Korean, and Banned Book Club is based on her experience as a college student in an underground book club during Korea’s authoritarian military regime in the 1980s.

Estrada and Kim had planned to visit family and make the rounds of libraries, bookstores and conventions to promote their 2024 book No Rules Tonight and the upcoming Good Old Fashioned Korean Spirit. “I’ve long wanted to return to the United States because the brief trips I took back were always lifechanging,” Estrada told ICv2, but Hyun Sook’s job and a general lack of funds precluded longer stays. So in December 2024 Hyun Sook opted not to renew her contract at work, Estrada put together a traveling exhibit, and the couple planned their big trip, booking appearances at library and comics conventions as well as retailers across the country.

“That all came crashing down when I started seeing the news of cartoonists being locked up in horrifying conditions for indefinite periods,” Estrada told ICv2. “Artists being jailed for illegal work just for carrying art supplies. Writers being grabbed off of the street and disappeared for writing things the administration didn’t like. Legal residents being sent to concentration camps for seemingly no reason without due process. Tourists having their social media scoured for antifascist opinions.”

In March 2025, according to multiple news reports including The Guardian, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained UK cartoonist Rebecca Burke, who was traveling in the U.S. on a tourist visa, imprisoned her for 19 days, and denied her access to legal representation. As her father explained in a Facebook post after she returned, border officials claimed that by staying with a host family and helping with housework, Burke had violated the terms of her tourist visa. He added,

She was handcuffed when she was transferred from the border to the facility. When inside the facility ICE did not communicate where she was in the process, all her possessions were confiscated, lights were on 24/7 and there were four head counts each day during which they were forced stay on their bunk for at least an hour. When she was eventually transferred to Seattle airport to fly home she was taken in leg and waist chains and handcuffs, and was escorted to the plane.

With their planned book tour canceled, Estrada and Kim will offer free virtual author visits, workshops, and book talks to libraries, schools, and stores as an alternative.

“I will hopefully get a chance to visit again soon, even if just to see my family, but it will be without my wife and with great caution,” Estrada said. Any plans for a joint trip are off the table, however. “Hyun Sook already spent decades of her life fighting against a regime like this,” Estrada said. “She shared her story to warn people that things like this were possible. Now, some aspects of America are becoming even worse than what happened after Korea’s bloody coup, and I can’t risk throwing her back into the danger she luckily survived the first time. She risked her life for her own country, I’m not endangering her life for mine. And I’m also not going to abandon her for half a year to talk about her life story without her.”

In addition to Banned Book Club, No Rules Tonight, and Good Old Fashioned Korean Spirit, Estrada is the writer of two middle-grade Student Ambassador graphic novels (see “Review: ‘Student Ambassador: The Missing Dragon’ TP”) and the co-writer of Occulted (see “Review: ‘Occulted’ TP”).