Saint Catherine
Cartoonist: Anna Meyer
Publisher: First Second – 23rd Street
Publication Date: April 2025
The publication this month of Saint Catherine by Anna Meyer is a relatively big deal in graphic novel circles, because the new book marks the launch of a comics imprint for adults from the celebrated kids and YA comics publisher, First Second. Now, you can make the case that First Second has long published graphic novels for adult, with books like On A Sunbeam, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, and others, which star teenage characters but work with adult narratives and themes (to say nothing of the books they’ve published by Box Brown). But with Saint Catherine, the publisher has made the branding official, and in the coming months it has a slate of at least four other releases for adult readers, including one by comics star, Jesse Lonergan.
As such, I came into Saint Catherine with a bit of added curiosity, and I wanted to know how it might compare to past First Second releases. Saint Catherine is also the debut graphic novel for Meyer, whose work I’m unfamiliar with. All of that is to say that I have had this book circled on my calendar for sometime, and I was really looking forward to it. And I ended up enjoying it a great deal.
Saint Catherine is one of those New York City-set stories wherein people in their 20s hook up, share formative experiences, and ride the subway, often becoming the person they were meant to be, despite how starkly it contrasts with their (usually) Midwestern routes. This is a familiar setting and set-up, and there’s some comfort to it, some immediate sense of reader orientation, knowing exactly where one is starting as they get into this book.
From there, the book moves into what it specifically wants to say. Saint Catherine is a story that is mostly about Catholic guilt. The book’s protagonist is from a family so religious, that her mother calls her every Sunday to make sure that she’s going to church. And she is, she is going to church. Our inciting incident in this narrative is the one Sunday she decides to skip church, at the teasing behest of her boyfriend.
From there, our protagonist — whose name is Catherine — begins to be haunted by a demon, represented in adorable and versatile blob format on the page. To convey the presence of the demon, this book uses a neat comics-specific visual trick. With heavy and flooding inks, the demon haunts both Catherine and the page. It’s a bit similar to last year’s excellent book, The Jellyfish, in this way. Whereas The Jellyfish dotted its pages with expanding and blobby jellyfish to convey a mysterious and worsening medical condition, Saith Catherine does so to convey it’s narrators guilt over skipping church, which is born out of some other things she’s been hiding as well as her growing up and moving just a bit away from the strict religious household she was raised within.
All of this is great. It’s a fun, different way to do demons, and it lets the book have some fun with the back-and-forth between Catherine and her tormentor. The demon in Saint Catherine isn’t so much scary (although it would love you to think it was) as it is playful, and that makes this book standout.
Meyer’s cartooning is also clean and excellent, reminding me a bit of Tillie Walden’s linework, albeit far more grounded and less experimental. The most visually impressive scenes to me — blob demon aside — were the dream sequences in which she envisions interacting with the actual Saint Catherine, who is her patron saint. Rendered as if they were taken right off panes of stained glass, these pristine sequences give the book a wonderful sense of visual variety.
Overall, I really enjoyed Saint Catherine. It’s one of those graphic novels that has well-drawn characters and a sharp sense of narrative purpose, making no missteps that take you out of its plot. I read it quickly in two settings, so immersed was I in the story and finding out what was going on. There are some slightly predictable bits here — mostly around the arc of the mother-daughter relationship — but I don’t think they really detract much from the experience, if at all. What makes this book truly interesting is a fantastic and well-earned twist part-way through that I won’t spoil here.
If you’ve enjoyed First Second’s books over the years as much as I have, you’ll almost certainly enjoy this book. It has the same great sense of story, wonderful artwork, and poignant themes as their books often do, but now our main characters have aged up just a bit.
Saint Catherine is available April 29
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