From Star-Crossed Lover to Starving Corpse: Reanimating Juliet for Young Female Readers

What happens when Shakespeare’s Juliet does not die, but returns from the crypt as a starving corpse? The article examines Jacopo Angelini and Chiara Iacobelli’s Italian graphic novel Giulietta Zombie (2023) as a YA appropriation of Romeo and Juliet and as a rhizomatic Shakespearean adaptation in which comic form, zombie narrative, Teen Gothic, and feminist storytelling intersect. Taking Shakespeare’s tragic ending as its point of departure, the graphic novel turns Juliet’s apparent death into the premise for a new process of narrative and corporeal reanimation. The beautiful dead heroine is reconfigured as a hungry adolescent body, whose post-mortem condition becomes the perceptual and narrative center of the graphic novel. Through internal focalization, differentiated word balloons, and oscillating page rhythm, Giulietta Zombie relocates Juliet’s inwardness from soliloquy to the embodied architecture of the comics page. While Giulietta retains Juliet’s defiance of familial, civic, and religious authority, her undead embodiment gives material form to contemporary anxieties about female adolescence, bodily estrangement, and autonomy. By transforming tragic closure into survival and self-possession, Giulietta Zombie offers contemporary young readers an alternative model of female subjectivity shaped by visual literacy, popular media, and the multimodal conditions through which Shakespeare is encountered by YA audiences.