Comic Chat – The IRC client that drew you as a comic strip still works
July 17, 2026 at 09:21
/BY
KORBEN ✨/3 MIN READ/Related categories
Microsoft just dropped theber it, but it was a piece of software released in 1996, dreamed up by DJ Kurlander at Microsoft Research, that displayed your IRC conversations as an auto-generated comic strip – characters, speech bubbles, and panel layout all handled automatically
It was written in C++ and 30 years later, it still compiles!
You’d type a sentence, and the software would decide which characters to stick in the panel, what expression they’d have, how to orient them, what shape to give the speech bubble, when to move to the next panel, and even what zoom level to apply. All in real time, based on your words. For example, if you put an exclamation mark in your sentence, boom – your avatar would throw its arms up.
Comic Chat recompiled under Visual Studio 2022, on Windows 11. The emotion wheel is in the bottom right.
Kurlander presented his creation at SIGGRAPH 96 with Tim Skelly and David Salesin, and it was pretty innovative for the time – because Comic Chat didn’t just display your messages, it made editorial decisions based on the vibe of your conversation, all without any AI ^^.
The people you were chatting with were on IRC servers typing away at the command line. And you, on your side, were inside an actual comic strip talking to them – with each person automatically assigned their own little character. The drawings you saw on screen, by the way, didn’t come from a
clipart library[FR]
. It was
Jim Woodring
, an American indie comic artist, who created those characters.
The app was translated into 24 languages, shipped with Internet Explorer 3, and then bundled with Windows 98 – so you may have had it without even knowing. Version 2 then came along with IE4 under the name Microsoft Chat, before instant messaging swallowed everything whole in the early 2000s.
Microsoft writes in its announcement that Comic Chat, and I quote, “brought Comic Sans to the world” – except in reality it was Vincent Connare who drew the font in 1994 for Microsoft Bob, driven mad by its Times New Roman speech bubbles. And that font shipped in the Windows 95 Plus! Pack, a full year before Comic Chat. Yeah, you can’t pull that one on me ^^.
What’s funny is that if you dig around the GitHub repository and look at the commit history, you’ll see that Microsoft didn’t just push an archive and call it a day. They actually reconstructed the entire Git history from the file dates. So you can stumble across commits dated August 2, 1996. Kind of wild, right?
I think it’s really cool that this project has been open- went MIT last year. In any case, there‘s been some modernization work done at Microsoft, with versions that can run on today’s screens and connect to real current IRC servers over TLS. You can download these
recent compiled builds here
And if you want to jump in, Mermaid Elizabeth even maintains
a list of servers
that still work with it. Personally, between that and
a modern IRC client[FR]
, my choice is obvious! ^^
Anyway, if you want to see what the web looked like when people were seriously asking “what if conversations were comic strips?“,
it’s on GitHub
.
- https://mermeliz.com/srvr_rms.htm
- https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2026/07/16/microsoft-comic-chat-is-now-open-source/
This article was originally written in French and automatically translated. Read the original.
This article may contain AI-generated images. I take great care with every article, but if you spot a slip-up, let me know!
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