Books always win
Creative Staff:
Writers: Kim Hyun Sook, Ryan Estrada
Artist: Ko Hyung-Ju
Publisher, Editor: C. Spike Trotman
Book Designer: Matt Sheridan
Proofreader: Abby Lehrke
Print Technician: Rhiannon Rasmussen-Silverstein
Published by: Iron Circus Comics
What They Say:
It’s 1983 during South Korea’s Fifth Republic, a military regime that has entrenched its power through censorship, torture, and murder of protesters. In this charged political climate, a freshman named Kim Hyun Sook seeks refuge in the comfort of books. When the handsome young editor of the school newspaper invites her to his reading group, she expects to talk about Moby Dick, Hamlet, and The Scarlet Letter. Instead she finds herself hiding in a basement as the youngest member of an underground banned book club. And as Hyun Sook soon discovers, in a totalitarian regime, the delights of discovering great works of illicit literature are quickly overshadowed by fear and violence.
In Banned Book Club, Hyun Sook shares her dramatic true story of political division, fear-mongering, the death of democratic institutions, and the relentless rebellion of reading.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
My US history is not generally great, due in no small part to my own lack of studiousness in high school and college, so my knowledge of Korean history is, expectantly, even worse. What I do know is relatively contemporary, or centered around World War II and the Korean War, and even then it’s just broad strokes, and even those are probably bad. The closest I can get to sounding intelligent in regards to Korean history is remembering Park Geun-hye’s name, and that was only four years ago. Or at least the big moment was.
All this to say I’m glad I finally read (albeit a truncated memoir version) anything about Korean history. What I know about Korea in the 80s is all about the 88 Olympics, and even then it stops at “they happened, wasn’t that pretty cool?” So I dove into this with barely any knowledge of the goings on in Korea, and it mentions that the Olympics were pushed in Korea to distract its citizens from their corrupt and terrible leadership. It opened my eyes to the fact that, as much as South Korea is looked at as a bastion of democracy or at least competency amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, it was not always that way.
What Banned Book Club does best is keep these characters at the heart of the narrative, and allow them to be a throughline through everything. The story is always about Hyun Sook, Hoon, and the rest of the banned book club, and that grounds all of the political stuff and the protests and makes the torture of them feel that much more visceral by extension.
And Hyun Sook’s entire character arc feels so believable! From the young college freshman who was too sheltered or too complacent with her position in life to the woman who fought for her fellow Koreans’ freedoms. It’s never something that feels forced, which I guess is a plus of it being a memoir.
I think what really highlights this transformation is two scenes… The first is in one of her first class as they discuss Henry VI, and how the people in that story rose up against the government. It’s a moment when a person in authority, rather than her peers in the book club, say that everything is political. It opens her eyes to this idea that nothing can just be taken as a story or at face value. There is always something beneath the narratives and stories that is commenting on the times. Henry VI is political. This traditional Korean dance and story from 900 years ago is political. Everything is political. The second is as she has joined up fully with the book club near the end, and she says to someone reading Jack London’s White Fang that a book by him published two years prior, The Iron Heel, was banned while White Fang was not. It’s exemplary of what Hyun Sook has learned through the entirety of the book, that everything is political. There’s a reason The Iron Heel was banned, while Jack London as a whole was not, and that’s political. But Jack London’s and Shakespeare’s and Hyun Sook’s freedom of expression should be this very basic value within Korean society—and within society at large—but it is not.
It’s easy to see the folks beating Hyun Sook’s friends and fellow book club members as evil, but it’s the moments where their politics are described that makes it so much more vile. What they’re doing, what they’re believing (such as that communists and communism by their very definition are evil, with no explanation given why, which leads to Hoon reading a book about communism so he can understand what they’re calling him, if they’re going to call him that), and most importantly who they’re working for, Chun Doo-hwan, is what makes them such great villains. Even Agent Ok, the tangible (at least to the book club) embodiment of who and what they’re facing embraces all of these ideals and thoughts so wholly that it’s just…kind of creepy. Ok—who has a wife and kid and who does this job for them, as any other evil jerk does their job usually for reasons other than solely power trips—is a guy who wants to do well in a job. He wants to represent his country. And he wants to be recognized for the good work he does. He sees Chun atop a real or imagined peak that he strives to, because he sees mere achievement as the goal, rather than what is learned along the way. The banned book club knows that the knowledge gained is much more important than the gains earned. It is about why Lord Saye rose up against the government in Henry VI, and it is about the monster that eats Yangban, the politician.
But everything is cyclical, or at least not linear. By the time 2016 rolls around, they are still protesting a corrupt president, but for far different reasons. Park Geun-hye did not massacre hundreds of her own citizens as Chun’s predecessor, Choi Kyu-hah, did and as Chun perpetuated on a seemingly much smaller scale. But the people are still in the streets of South Korea, protesting against the nation’s first woman president nonetheless. Korea, through it all, is a nation of democracy, through the fights of those in the 80s, before, and after. But this story—both in the 80s and in 2016—show that there may be a good ending to this all anywhere. There are so many parallels between the two country’s leadership, even if they aren’t direct, that may be both intention and unintentional (given that it is a memoir, I’d imagine more the latter). People, some of them at least, will always be willing to fight.
But through it all, remember kindness. It is the humanizing moments of the book club that gives this book so much heart. When Yuni, after she details the atrocities done upon her by the police to Hyun Sook, shows kindness to the misguided or misinformed (or both) kid in the newspaper club that’s feeding information to Agent Ok. That’s the kind of moment that reminds me that these protesters, even while they’re punching the police in the face, have a heart for those that need to hear it. They can never stoop to the level of those they’re fighting against.
In Summary:
I came into this pretty cold, but I (perhaps predictably) ended up liking this comic a whole lot. The story of protests in the 80s against a corrupt government give me hope for any current or future protest. There’s a lot of work to be done, and there’s a lot of work still to do, but Banned Book Club shows that the work is worth it. Sometimes you make lifelong friends along the way. I imagine all the time, you’d make lifelong friends if your life is threatened by an authoritarian regime that’ll beat you half to death four times a year.
Also Hyun Sook’s family is just so adorable, and I’m sad I couldn’t slide in anything else about them in the review, but here we are at the end and I just have to say…thank you to all the parents who made sacrifices for their children.
Content Grade: A-
Art Grade: A-
Age Rating: Young adult
Released By: Iron Circus Comics
Release Date: May 19, 2020
MSRP: $15.00
