Hi, I'm Robert Standefer, the guy who made this happen, with lots of support. I'm excited to see the enthusiasm about Comic Chat being open sourced. How this came to happen is a very interesting story that spans a six-year period with success that hinged upon being in the right place at the right time, literally.

I want to point out that, while I (along with Scott Hanselman) made the Comic Chat open source release happen, I am not the original developer. That is DJ Kurlander, and he was very supportive of this project. He was even enthusiastic about it.

Comic Chat has a special place in my heart because it inspired my first startup back in 2008, a comic creation web app called Chogger. The site grew to 30K monthly users, mostly K-12 educators who wanted to give their students a fun way to write stories.

The comic creator app itself was adobe flex (flash), actionscript 3.0 (like a typed version of javascript), and I remember spending so many hours getting the balloon tail dragging behavior just right...

one of the teachers made a video overview of how it worked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKT70TBw1vw

Comic Chat is a piece of Internet history, but I remember that it was somewhat reviled when I first started being active on IRC. This was around 2002, so it was probably due to some cultural memory rather than anyone having actually used it in years.

The issue, as I remember it, is that Comic Chat extended the IRC protocol with support for explicitly indicating the appearance and emoting of your comic character, rather than relying entirely on contextual cues. This was essentially done by adding some nonsense string to every message, which presumably could be decoded by other Comic Chat users, but read like spammy noise to everyone else. I know it did that, because I remember downloading Comic Chat to check it out, but I forget whether it was the default or not.

> The early web was filled with experimentation. “What if chat rooms looked like comics?” That question sounds wonderfully unreasonable. And yet it was built, shipped, localized into 24 languages, and bundled with Windows 98.

This really resonated with me. Too much development work today feels like colouring in predefined boxes. Love to see some software that thought way out of the box and got institutional support.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/237170.237260

Related: The authors wrote a paper on their design of the layout engine.

https://bonequest.com/

There's an interesting easter egg in semantic.cpp, line 77:

  if (CheckWord(words, "OXio")) {

Someone wants to taste the curb!

https://achewood.com/2007/07/05/title.html

Direct link to GitHub repo: https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat

Oh man, I remember this from when I was in college. I didn't really realize it was IRC, and so I thought everybody else in the chat rooms was using it and saw the visualizations.

30 years later and I still cringe at the memories. (The problem was not the client, it was me, heh.)

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.

A google search for the creator of the Comic Sans font, Vincent Connare, triggers a fun google Easter egg.

I'm fascinated that I have never heard of this, even though I did use IRC during that early 2000s era.

The creator is still at Microsoft. Lifer.

Only tangentially related, but I'm convinced Comic Sans is the best font option available in Slack, and everyone should try it.

One of my first ever gigs was writing comedy sketches for a BBC digital channel using MS Comic Chat, which they filmed as if it were a super low frame rate cartoon. The most incredibly cheap TV. I think we (my writing/performing partners and I) generated a few hours of usable footage for them and got paid about 50 quid each.

That’s hilarious. I hope to see some fun spinoffs.

Ran comic chat on a freshly installed Win98 (or 95, don’t remember) Pentium II.

Yes… Ha ha ha… YES!

I still think this project has potential.

...for years I've talked about this program here on HN! This is exciting for me, I will definitely be downloading and perusing the code when I get back home from vacation. Thank you to the original developers, and to the current team at Microsoft that made this release possible!

I have a vivid memory of my sister and my mom in Puerto Rico, on our packardbell computer, hearing it making dial-up noises for days or hours, until they finally got online. I also remember seeing my sister using that program in the 90s, I must have been 5 to 7 years old, she was a teenager.

Fun fact, it's an IRC client that injects its own schema and then other Comic Chat IRC compatible clients interpret it and display it. You can go on freenet (DONT GO INTO POPULATED CHANNELS!) and go into like #hn-comic-chat or something and others who join will see what you see!

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

>Alongside the original snapshots, we’ve included a few AI-powered modernization attempts that demonstrate what’s possible—getting this 1990s-era C++ and MFC code building with current Visual Studio tools, connecting to modern IRC servers, and running legibly on today’s high-resolution Windows machines.

Given that MSFT is all in on Rust and WinUI now, maybe they can try doing a full port similar to Bun using Copilot. Anthropic has been milking their Bun port attempt for as much as they can.

I remember Comic Chat

I still bring that up when I get to discussing the weird days of the Internet when it felt like people were just trying all kinds of things left and right.

The folks at Jerk City will be very happy.

https://www.jerkcity.com/9981

This is not a font (like Comic Sans) but was an actual application (to make comics from IRC chats) that was shipped with Windows 98. The application got open sourced.. https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat

Thanks for the artifact :D

I look forward to seeing someone use this as a pipeline for AI video creation (and I don't see that as a bad thing fyi)

Jerk City sends its regards

Nice, I just made an IRC app that loads comic chat files a few weeks ago.

I added some updates, ignore bots, new expressions, diff message bubble behavior, more panels, custom avatars, colors, etc.

https://github.com/IronWolve/MaxChat

This is awesome. Is there some way we could replace the MS Teams meeting Facilitator with this?

When somebody inevitably LLM this to rust/zig/bling/zork/vupt; please drop a link!

i use Comic Mono in my terminal :) (comic chat probably isn't monospace)

https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font/

Great idea. Got it running on the web. Come hang :) https://chat.elsewhere.zone/

Merge this with the public servers of https://bitlbee.org to use Jabber or Mastodon servers (among others) with it.

  v1.0-pre and v1.0 share the same internal version number (rup 206, "Beta 2") but differ in ~99 of 111 shared source files [1]

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat#:~:text=v1.0%2Dpre%2...

[2]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251028-00/?p=11...

Publishing various versions of the code in a version control system repository as separate directories living on the same branch is an interesting choice.

I remember implementing the paper at some point, and though it was fun enough that it would make for a slightly less boring programming project for students.

I was around 16 when I discovered this, and it was my first IRC client. Didn't fully get what IRC was yet. It felt like a new world opening up.

This is so peak, haha, love it. Thanks HN, made my day :)

It's New to me. I love comics. Hypothetically speaking if I drew my comic will I be able to post it in here.

This was my first introduction to internet

Back when people had a sense of humour and just wanted to sully your chat log.

Related. You can make XKCD style comics easily with this web-app and library called cmx.js

https://orsenthil.github.io/cmx.js/

https://senthil.learntosolveit.com/posts/2026/06/17/xkcd-dia...

Microsoft Comic Chat - the only place where using Comic Sans is appropriate

Impressed that they actually hired Jim Woodring to help with the original.

Open source Windows NT instead

So the real question is, when will somebody turn this into a Discord client?

I think it was my introduction to IRC. If not it would have been shortly after.

I still want the XiRCON source

I was fascinated by this as a young teenager. I still love it

Still better chat experience than MS Teams

This is very cool. Do V-Chat next!

Need a Teams integration, stat

Thirty years old. Hard to believe

Rust/Go rewrite when?

HURF DURF

Waste of time like upgrading Notepad but but we don't have calendar on dual-screen monitor since win11 came out.

Nice. finally I will be abale to communicate with the new hires! LOL

\me plays ahhhBeer.wav

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Extend, embrace

I loved Comic Chat, countless good memories when dial up was still a thing.

I'll fork it and have fun with it again, with the help of AI of course ;-)

Back when software development was fun. And not the sloppy vibecoded corporate metrics pleaser it has become.

Depressing to see all the AI-generated text in an article about a creative communication tool. Even the comic's punchline is clunky, and no human being would ever refer to Michael Jordan as the "Space Jam guy."

Microsoft Comic Chat was my first introduction to IRC. I was just a kid poking around in system32 directory and found mschat.exe. It opened a whole new world. I still participate in IRC communities to this day. I regularly reference it.

So it's a shame that microsoft is blocking non-corporate browsers from accessing this news release, "The request is blocked. 20260716T162640Z-r17d8486fc4rbjkdhC1CHI16pc00000008m000000000a54t" I imagine most people who care about MS Comic Chat aren't using Chrome or Edge. A better URL since MS is blocking might be https://www.phoronix.com/news/Microsoft-Comic-Chat-OSS or just the github repo that's in another comment.