Environmental attorney Eddie Ahn has spent his entire professional life advocating for sustainability in underserved and underrepresented communities through the San Francisco nonprofit Brightline Defense since 2009. His dedication to environmental justice activism as its executive director has given him enough clout to serve on three commissions, one of which — the SF Commission on the Environment — he has served as president of since 2022.
That is just a small taste of his achievements. With all that is going on in his professional life, it is almost hard to believe he manages to find any spare time to devote to his second passion, art and comics. Ahn is a self-taught artist who has gained some recognition for his talent. He was the Charles M. Schulz Museum’s Cartoonist-in-Residence in 2012 and he even had a comics art show at the Dada Art Gallery in San Francisco in 2017. He has also self-published his own fictional comics, which he showcased through Small Press Expo, an alternative comics convention, as well as local zine fests.
Ahn started writing and drawing about his personal and professional journey in 2018 and started publishing them on Instagram in Feb. 2020, just before the world shut down from the pandemic. As he gradually gained a large following, a publisher approached him about a possible book deal a few years later.
This culmination of his experiences was finally published in April 2024 as Advocate: A Graphic Novel Memoir of Family, Community, and the Fight for Environmental Justice. What started off as 10 short stories evolved to a graphic novel divided into seven chapters.
Ahn’s usage of color was intentional, as he has explained in several interviews during the promotion of Advocate. The colors he uses represents different stages of his journey and were used as a mechanism to move back and forth from “flashbacks” to “flash forwards.” For instance, shades of red represent “the passions of youth,” green represents his early college years up to law school, blue represents a calmer period as he gets more settled in his role, and purple represents a transition period since blue and red are needed to create the color.
In an interview with The Letterhack’s Matt Strackbein, Ahn says, “[The Advocate] is about advocating for diverse communities but also for oneself and understanding one’s own life better, which has been a long process for me. It has been over 15 years at this point of understanding generosity — and even the limits of generosity to some degree.”
These struggles are chronicled in the Advocate, as Ahn covers the issues he constantly grappled with, such as balancing and budgeting time and money, as well as the inspiring people he was introduced to through his work, like Dr. Espanola Jackson. He talks about the work he and his team put into promoting Brightline under their constrained budget, and the ways his team serviced the community during trying times, such as the pandemic.
Ahn also touches on the thankless nature of his job, such as the times he experienced racism or anti-Asian hate while living in a progressive community, calling into question why he was doing the job in the first place. On the flip side, he also talks about the generosity of strangers, which appears when he least expects it.
His friends and colleagues show concern for him as he stretches himself thin, and advise him to do something that would reap more benefits for himself. An ardent camp in this party are his Korean immigrant parents, who, after graduating from The University of Texas at Austin, opened a liquor store. He and his parents did not see eye-to-eye about his passion for service because he was not earning a high income despite having a law degree. The desire to show his parents his gratitude and appreciation in a substantial way conflicts with his passion for service.
“My parents pursued economic success, built over time by selling bottles wrapped in bags, and then reinvested what they had in me. Which makes nonprofit work even more difficult for me,” he writes in the book. “It’s always been hard not to worry about my parents, who have sacrificed so much for me to achieve a law degree. The irony of feeling selfish for pursuing nonprofit work over the years doesn’t escape me.”
As anyone with experience in nonprofits already knows, the passion for the institution’s mission is often what drives its employees, and Ahn shows the demands of the work and the frustrations he encounters clearly through its pages. Though he downplays his role in the progress attained in his community and the work he has done, it is hard not to feel awed by his selflessness and the drive that pushes him toward his vision of a better future. Despite the setbacks he has received, his positive attitude is admirable, and the book leaves me feeling more hopeful about the future and less cynical about humanity.
Eddie Ahn will discuss his book with writer, producer, and nonprofit director Daniel Tam-Claiborne at the Elliott Bay Book Company on Nov. 1 at 7 p.m. You can RSVP to the event here.
