Microsoft revives Comic Chat as open source

Microsoft has open-sourced Comic Chat, its oddball 1990s attempt to turn IRC conversations into comic strips — and for plenty of users, it was also their first brush with Comic Sans.

Released in 1996 alongside Internet Explorer 3, Microsoft Comic Chat was created by David “DJ” Kurlander of the Microsoft Research Virtual Worlds Group as a new way to visualize conversation history. Instead of a plain scrolling log of text, chats appeared as cartoon panels with characters, backgrounds, and speech bubbles.

According to Microsoft, Jim Woodring, described by the company as “a highly regarded independent comic artist,” created the visual style that gave the software its distinctive look.

This was long before generative systems. Comic Chat built scenes using rules: if a user typed “I like that,” Microsoft said, the character might point to itself; if the message suggested anger, the character could frown or cross its arms.

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Microsoft said Comic Chat did more than put a comic-book layer over IRC. The software interpreted cues in the text and selected poses, facial expressions, gestures, and panel layouts in real time, effectively making editorial choices about how a conversation should be presented.

The gimmick did not last. Microsoft shut the project down in the early 2000s, even as the software had been localized into 24 languages and bundled with Windows 98. Still, the company now frames it as a product from a more experimental era of software design.

“Comic Chat was created during a period when software teams were willing to color outside the lines, literally and figuratively.”

Microsoft released the code under the MIT license.