With a heavy heart, American illustrator Ryan Estrada canceled a four-month trip to his home country with his Korean wife and collaborator, writer Kim Hyun Sook. After years of planning, and Kim quitting her day job, they ultimately decided that the United States is no longer a safe place to travel. “All it’d take is for a border guard to even suspect Hyun Sook was attending a book conference to falsely accuse her of planning illegal work and have ICE drag her handcuffed to a concrete cell. Finding out she writes BANNED books might put them in a mood to make things worse,” Estrada said in a social media post on March 13. “WHO KNOWS how much worse things will get by the summer when we planned to leave, or while we were there. She wrote her book about living under a dictator to warn us that it was possible. Time has proven that it is, and I don’t plan to make her relive it.” Estrada and Kim, both Busan residents, gained global recognition with the release of “Banned Book Club,” their graphic novel published in 2020 based on Kim’s experiences at university in the 1980s when Korea was under
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