Microsoft has released the complete Comic Chat source code on GitHub, preserving the pioneering IRC client for developers, historians, and enthusiasts to study, explore, and experiment with.
Microsoft has open-sourced the complete Comic Chat codebase, releasing the historic software on GitHub and preserving a pioneering IRC client for developers, researchers, historians, and enthusiasts to study and experiment with.
Developed by computer scientist David Kurlander as part of Microsoft Research’s Virtual Worlds Group, Comic Chat entered development in 1995. Unlike conventional chat clients that displayed scrolling text, it transformed conversations into comic strip panels.
The software automatically interpreted users’ messages and dynamically selected character poses, facial expressions, and comic panel layouts to visualise conversations. Although entirely rule-based and not AI-driven, Comic Chat anticipated ideas that resemble today’s AI-powered comic generation tools.
The illustrated characters were created by independent comic artist Jim Woodring.
Comic Chat also became the first major application to use Comic Sans, introducing the font to a broad audience. Comic Sans was designed in 1994 by Microsoft typographer Vincent Connare for Microsoft Bob, but it missed that product’s release and instead found its first practical use in Comic Chat. Created to replicate the hand-lettered appearance of comic speech bubbles, the font suited the application before later becoming one of the world’s most recognisable—and most criticised—computer typefaces.
While Microsoft describes Comic Chat primarily as a historical software project rather than a modern application, its open-source release allows the original implementation to be explored, studied, and preserved for future generations.
