During the height of Covid in 2020, environmental policy advocate Eddie Ahn started what he thought was just a pandemic project — posting snippets of his comic book memoir to social media. The posts — about career anxieties, the bumpy road to artistic success, and growing up Korean American with industrious immigrant parents — resonated with readers.

And then his comic strips took off.

The original goal was to develop a series of short stories for the small but well-respected comics publisher Fantagraphics. But when Ahn received an email from Penguin Random House about publishing his work as a book, he quickly pivoted to a longer-form narrative, creating what would become the graphic novel, Advocate. In the richly illustrated and sparingly colored memoir, Ahn weaves his family’s story into a broader one about community activism and environmental justice.

In his day job, Ahn is the executive director at San Francisco-based environmental non-profit Brightline Defense and serves on three California environmental policy commissions. But in the early morning before work and late at night, he’s a cartoonist and storyteller.

Ahn started crafting his memoir in 2016 to explain to his parents why he stayed in low-paying non-profit work, even after earning a fancy law degree. Often working into the wee hours of the morning, he sketched and inked the panels, and shaded in his monochromatic color palette with trusty Copic markers. He then would digitally edit in dialogue boxes. Each page, he said, represents 20 to 30 hours of work, with a total of 5,000 hours poured into the book’s publication last April.

Ahn made several stops in Boston last month to talk about his memoir. He visited the Josiah Quincy Elementary and Upper schools, Boston Latin Academy, the Harvard Countway Library, the Boston Bar Association, and rounded off the trip with an event at Bedford’s Lif Bookshop. In talks, Ahn is soft-spoken and engaging, with eyes that crinkle into half-moons when he smiles, which is often.
Ahn sat down with Sampan to chat about his family’s reactions to the book, “burrito math,” storytelling, activism, and working with students. The following has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Sampan: You talk about your parents’ reactions to the book as you’re in the process of making it. Have those reactions changed now that it’s been published, either with your parents or with your extended family in Korea?

Ahn: With my mother, I think the reaction was really nice. I was very nervous that she would hate the book, thinking it’s a very bad take on her relationship with her father, my grandfather. But she ended up liking it a lot. She said she cried on multiple readings of the book, and that’s as good of a reaction as I could have hoped for that. And she’s now much more accepting of the nonprofit, so I think the book achieved its original goal.My father, unfortunately, is very sick; he’s been consistently getting worse over the last two years. I did manage to show him the book when I was in South Korea. His eyes were tracking the pages as I was turning them, but verbally he was not responsive. So I’m not quite sure if he really appreciated it, but at least I showed him the pages.

And then my extended family, like my cousins, my aunts and even my grandmother, who’s still alive on my father’s side — they can’t read it in its entirety because they’re not fluent in English, but they can appreciate the visual work. And they know the corporation Penguin Random House. They’re like, “Oh, wow! This is like something that’s in any bookstore in America.”

Sampan: How did it feel to illustrate those more emotionally charged scenes around your family?
Ahn: Complicated. Even nowadays as I illustrate more about my father’s decline, some of those panels are so hard to draw that I often draw them out of order. And then I mix and match and try to tell a story that makes sense linearly later.

I think the process of creating comics can be very hard, especially if you are the writer and artist. I have overarching themes, goals, and storytelling I want to achieve, and then I need to just start committing it on paper. As I draw, I’m finding the storytelling “beats” and getting it to a stage where the eye can move rapidly across a page.

Going back to the emotional conflicts in the book and the difficulties of my family, I think it was important to put it out there. For me, it was always just trying to find that right balance. You want to make each story emotionally resonant, authentic, but you don’t want to burden the reader with so much detail, or maybe even so much emotion, where you get bogged down with it all.

Sampan: In addition to your family, another figure that features prominently is the late Dr. Espanola Jackson, a noted environmental and social justice activist who lived in the Bayview-Hunters Point area of San Francisco. What do you hope that people take away from her advocacy story?

Ahn: I hope they focus on her as an individual. Being able to tell her story on this kind of platform, whether it was an Instagram account or a published memoir, I thought that was really good. She could be known as a local figure, very specific to San Francisco history. But I wanted to make her story a lot more than that, too.

The other thing I hope people take away from the chapter on Espanola is the relationship between two very different individuals, myself and her, and the different communities that we are part of and represent.

In the U.S., we pride ourselves on being a multiracial society. We talk a lot about different communities, and how we need to unite to come together. But the act of building that kind of bridge is quite hard.
Even in nonprofit work, it’s easy to get siloed and not reach across to a very different audience or community from your own. A lot of my work early on in environmental policy-making was not necessarily about the policy but building up communities and making them relate more to environmental policy. That is something that I really wanted to focus on in telling Espanola’s story.

Sampan: Switching gears, one thing I thought was quite funny in your book was when you talked about measuring the cost of things in burritos, which at the time was eight dollars for a two-meal burrito. Do you still use “burrito math”?

Ahn: There’s a new burrito inflation happening, so a burrito can cost as much as twenty dollars, which I was astonished by. I don’t eat burritos nearly as often now, probably once a week. So I still keep in touch with the burrito economy.

Do I measure everything in burritos? Not as much anymore. My life has become more settled. The burrito math days were very scrappy days, super, super intense work days. The salary I made for a long time at Brightline was rough for a high cost of living area like San Francisco. But my life has become a lot more settled, thank goodness!

Sampan: You start Advocate with your first out-of-college job at an after-school program in Oakland, California, and the close relationships you formed with your students. What has it been like talking with young people on your book tour? Any differences between the older and younger students?

Ahn: The presentations I give between the grade levels are very different. For elementary to middle school, we intentionally built in a graphic novel making section. So the students had a bunch of clipboards and two sheets of paper, and I would talk to them about panel layout. It wasn’t so much about my own story, my graphic memoir. I talked a little bit about my family with that audience, but the purpose of that kind of talk is really to empower them, to have them be able to tell their own story.

Sampan: And what about high school or college students?

Ahn: Those conversations were very sharp, and I was pleasantly surprised by how engaged they were with the concept of climate change, and, “What can I do around it?”

The title of the book, Advocate, was always meant to have several meanings. It’s not just about being an advocate for environmental policy or environmental injustice; it’s also about being an advocate for oneself. So I could see the high school students grapple with that as well, like, what does it mean to carve out my own path?

Even the act of putting yourself out there is a hard act lately, especially as we put ourselves under the scrutiny of social media. A lot of the book is about me making mistakes or looking a little silly. An example would be the Armani coat hustle, for instance. (Ahn had went into a stranger’s car in San Francisco only to discover he was falling for a scam.)

A hilarious thing (also) happened a week ago — this literally happened within hours of me arriving from the airport in Manhattan, and I was just walking along the street. A car rolled up next to me, and they implored me to get closer. And I could automatically tell, this is not a good situation. But as I got closer the person said, “Hey, my friend. I’m a tourist. Can you help me?” … and pulls out a gold ring.
In other words, it probably was another variation on the hustle. I was like, “Oh, I’m OK, but can I take a picture?” And the car zoomed away.

(And I thought:)… I gotta draw a comic about that.

Sampan: Now that you’ve finished Advocate, is there anything you’ve learned about storytelling while working on this project that you hope to take into your next one?

Ahn: A couple things come to mind.

Fiction versus nonfiction, I’ve always actually been more comfortable in fiction storytelling. Nonfiction took a long time for me to get used to, and it’s only through Instagram feedback that I realized people actually like these stories, after all.

Nonfiction has been much more challenging because it feels a lot more personal. Fiction, in some ways it can be a shield, you can change present day circumstances into a much more comfortable narrative. So there’s that component.

With this particular comic, if I do a second book of the nonfiction autobiographical comics, now that I’ve spent six or seven years refining this process, I will be a lot more efficient. That’s the upside. I know the color palette I’m working with, I know there are characters that I want to include that weren’t covered in the first book. In other words, there are gaps in the story that I could refine and drill down on.
In the next year, I want to see what the longer-term response to this book is. I do think people’s perception changes over time based on the era that they live in. This year’s response to the book has actually been stronger than last year’s response, because environmental justice, for instance, is being obliterated at the federal level and people are realizing we can’t ignore this subject.

It’s stuff like that that really drives me to produce perhaps a second story. But in terms of storytelling technique, the goal is to become faster, better, stronger.