Iron Circus Comics has announced that next month it will released Banned Book Club, a new graphic novel from Kim Yun Sook, Ryan Estrada, and Ko Hyung-Ju.
Iron Circus Comics describes the book in this excerpt from the company’s press release:
The book recounts Hyun Sook’s time as a college student in a secret underground reading group during South Korea’s brutal totalitarian regime in the early ’80s. As a fellow book person, I know Hyun Sook’s story of intrigue, danger, political persecution, victory, and the power of literature will resonate with you as much as it did with me!
The book starts with Hyun Sook’s first days at university where she joins the titular book club, but it quickly morphs into a page-turning thriller as government watchdogs try to crush a rising wave of student protest, an environment that makes the club’s actions extremely dangerous and increasingly so when they take their rebellion to the next level.
What really jumps out at you while reading this history now is how distressingly similar that atmosphere is to what we see all around us today with extremist views on the rise — the clampdown on the press, the vilification of political opponents, and on and on. BANNED BOOK CLUB, like all great works of history, is partly about its time period but also the urgent challenges we now face if we repeat the mistakes of the past.
Banned Book Club is scheduled to arrive on May 19, 2020.
