I'm obsessed with the song "Burn" by k-pop artist KEY (Kim Kibum.) I've spent hours listening to it and picking apart the things I enjoy about it: the techniques and the layering, the mixing and the vocal choices. Naturally, I hoped to one day make a zine that communicated my feelings about the song, because zines are how I communicate.
Even though I always have lots of ideas for what I want to make zines about, I won't make those zines until the right format for it finds me. And in the fall of 2024, it was the work of two of my book production students that inspired me to finally construct a zine to talk about Burn.
After talking to one student about expressing music in comics, and reviewing the work of another student who had made a fold-out zine in a new format that revealed things in different sequences, I decided I wanted to make a zine that unfolded in a way to reveal the song in the direction it felt like the song was going.
I started by listening to the song and drawing a map of what direction it felt like each section--intro, verse, prechorus, chorus, bridge, etc-- travelled visually.
Then with that sketch in hand, I did my favorite thing to do, start cutting up and folding paper to figure out how it might work. I started with a vertical 3 x 4 design, but it wasn't giving me enough panels for how I wanted to divide the song. I did know I wanted the last four panels to unfold upwards, like smoke rising as the singer communicates a feeling of being "extinguished."
Eventually I landed on a 4 x 4 horizontal arrangement on a tabloid-sized paper. The plan worked, but I realized that 14 barrel folds on one piece of paper was going to create some bulk. I needed to accomodate for the creep. Backwards. Since the assembly starts with folds at the end, I had to engineer trims that allowed the pages to get bigger and bigger as they unfolded, so they'd fit in the end.
I was pretty proud of my result! And now that I knew where I needed to fit my drawings and text, I started drawing.
The song doesn't have a music video to pull visuals from, but he did perform it at a concert, and luckily there was
lots of fan footage of that concert on youtube. So much so that I got to work from several different angles to draw Key singing the song. As I sketched him, I realized that his standing choreography felt more like smoke then fire, wispy and fluid. Those expressions made it feel like it was easy to tie together visually with the thruline smoke element.
After the drawing was inked in four separate sheets, I recomposited them on the computer and started planning the texture. I wanted to use inkwashes to provide contrast and encourage reading direction, but also had to consider where I could use full bleed (like on the trimmed edges) and where I couldn't (the top edge.
(Since my hope printer can't print 11 x 17, all my mock-up are in pieces, haha. Tedious, but fine!) When I was happy with the general design, I used a lightbox and some Arches watercolor roll to paint two full size wash wave designs. Then I scanned them and recomposited them and edited them into the background of the image.
Then I printed out a dummy (in two pieces, again, haha) and I had my working model!! Now I had to arrange the back text and lay that out in indesign for the second side. Having a dummy was absolutely essential for this step because all the folding put panels in an odd sequence and some of them are upside down on the master, and some are right side up. I had to cross-check thoroughly.
At this time I'm also engineering the cover, since some text might need to be on the cover and I couldn't finalize the interior text without it. I'd wanted to use this gold foil paper I'd stashed, and when I folded the cover, I realized I had extra on one end...and when folded...it looked like a matchbook!!! I folded up a dummy, doodled a cover design, and glued a strip of black cardstock on the bottom to look like a lighting strip. I felt like a GENIUS.
Then I finished the cover design and went into production! The interior went through one more iteration after test prints, when my first assembled copy went through a few hands testing it out and were meeting resistance when the tried to unfold it. My husband recommended I move the directional arrow from the folded corner to the corner that the person would grab to complete the flip, and that was the ticket. The next version, with the curly arrows, was way smoother to handle!
Here's the digital copy of the inside design!
Now, it's been hard to figure out a useful way to show how it's read. I'm not sure where it would be appropriate to upload a video of me unfolding it, so in lieu of that, here's a series of images showing it unfold into each page. (coming soon.)
I managed to make about 12 copies, and I'll sell about 8 of them off on my web shop soon. It's a lot of production for a very specific gimmick, so I don't think I'll make a lot more unless I'm going to a convention that I think it would be appreciated at.
The fun was really in the figuring out, though, so I'm pleased with how it turned out! Next time...I'm making a much less complicated zine!!!
<3
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