I teamed up with my wife Kim Hyun Sook and illustrator Ko Hyung-Ju to make Banned Book Club, the true story of her experiences being hunted down by the police for participating in an underground illegal reading club in 1980's Korea. Ironically, this book has been banned in Florida, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Texas. But it is also taught in schools and libraries all over the world, and received all of these awards and honors!

No Rules Tonight is Hyun Sook and I's newest story of fighting for freedom. I co-wrote and illustrated. There was a harsh curfew in 1980s Korea, and anyone out after midnight would go to jail. But the American soldiers who started the policy left one exception. December 24th. This is a story about what a group of teens decide to do with their one night to be free.

My friend Amy Rose grew up in a cult that taught her Star Trek was real, Gandhi was a sexy space alien, and the world was coming to an end. It wasn't until she discovered a secret library of banned books that she learned everything she needed to escape. I helped Amy and illustrator Jeongmin Lee turn this terrifying true story into a graphic novel. Despite its important message about the freedom to read, it since been banned in Texas.

Student Ambassador is my series of fun globe-trotting adventure stories for kids who want to see the world and make it a better place. Each story is inspired by my own travels, but turned into an action-adventure comedy! Readers can solve the mystery along with the character using real fun facts about the world. The Missing Dragon covers a kidnapping in Korea and Japan, while The Silver City is a monster mystery in the mines of Mexico. Both feature amazing art by the great Axur Eneas!

Ryan Estrada is an artist, author, and adventurer. His books include Banned Book Club, No Rules Tonight, Occulted, and the Student Ambassador series. He has made comics for Star Trek, Popeye, Flash Gordon, and Garfield.

He was a gator wrangler in America, an ambassador to Australia, an undocumented animator in Canada, a ghostbuster in South Korea, a Bollywood voiceover actor in India, wandered Kim Jong Il's secret tunnels to North Korea, slept on a bench in a typhoon in Japan, dug toilets in Thailand, did an accidental illegal border crossing into Burma, made road comics in Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Laos, Vietnam and The Philippines, documentaries in Colombia and Ecuador, and podcasts in Malaysia, ran with the bulls in Mexico, barely escaped being eaten by lions in Kenya, fainted atop Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, got caught in a Peruvian coca war, lived in a Costa Rican rainforest and a Panamanian volcano.

RANDOM FACTS

-Ryan started pitching comics to newspapers when he was six. He bothered the same newspaper until they finally hired him at age sixteen.

-Ryan accidentally invented the word normcore. It was a punchline to one of his comics before Oxford English Dictionary named it runner up word of the year.

-Ryan holds the world record for consecutive comic making after attempting and surpassing the 168 hour comic; one page per hour for a full week.

-Ryan ran @forexposure_txt, the popular artists rights novelty twitter account, for ten years

-Ryan was once interviewed by the BBC about a prank he pulled on Vladimir Putin. He'd been the official cartoonist of LiveJournal before Putin had the company bought out so he could move the servers in Russia and use them to shut down activists. He forgot that Ryan still had the legal and technological ability to make comics about their mascot speaking out against this and post them to the official site.

-Ryan does free virtual workshops and author visits for any school, library, or book club that asks! Here is a listing of some of his workshops. Drop him a line to set something up!