Microsoft Comic Chat is open source

What's this about?

Microsoft open-sourced Comic Chat, its 1996 IRC chat client that rendered conversations as an auto-generated comic strip, complete with expressive cartoon avatars. A genuine piece of internet history — and beloved as the engine behind the long-running webcomic jerkcity/bonequest.

What exactly is Comic Chat?

An experimental chat client from Microsoft Research: as people typed, it composed comic panels — choosing character poses, expressions, and speech-bubble layouts automatically from the text. It was decades ahead of its time as "generative" visual conversation, done with rules instead of AI.

What's the community saying?

1. jerkcity lives — delight that the cult webcomic built on Comic Chat is still going after ~28 years.
2. Retro-computing memories — people recalling running it on fresh Windows 95/98 installs.
3. Remix potential — "this project still has potential": expect AI-era spinoffs pairing modern LLMs with the comic renderer.