Bridging the Senses: Medium and Materiality from Music Videos to Graphic Lyrics

Inter- and extratextual media platforms define much of the realm of fandom and franchising. In “Bridging the Senses: Medium and Materiality from Music Video to Graphic Lyric,” Andrew Ty analyzes a set of illustrated books based on BTS songs and music videos that first introduced the The most beautiful moment in life albums’ Bangtan Universe storylines. Ty highlights how the physical objects of the Graphic Lyric books—the way they are physically designed—invite readers to manually handle the texts to engage with tactility. Ty argues that this “old” media, particularly in the rich transmedia landscape of Bangtan Universe and K-Pop in general, produces new ways of experiencing the audio and visual experiences of the songs and videos, which further enrich the fans’ engagement and memory of the original material.