Comic Chat

Welcome, traveler of the information superhighway! Microsoft Comic Chat is a chat client from the 1990s that renders your Internet Relay Chat (IRC) conversations as automatically generated comic strips. Instead of plain text, everyone talks through cartoon avatars in speech bubbles laid out into comic panels in real time.

💬 What Is Comic Chat?

Comic Chat is an IRC client, fully interoperable with plain-text IRC clients, with one delightful twist: as messages come in, each Comic Chat client runs a little expert system that automatically decides how to draw the conversation. For every message it figures out:

Even friends using plain-text IRC clients get automatically assigned a character, so the whole conversation is drawn as a comic.

🚀 How to Get Started

Ready to jump in? Here's the quick tour:

1. Get Comic Chat. You can download Comic Chat 2.5 from Mermaid Elizabeth's Microsoft Chat Resources. This is the version that shipped in the early 2000s.
2. Or try a modern build. Prefer high-resolution monitors? Grab an unofficial modern build of version 1.0 or 2.5b1, built to run on Windows 11.
3. Connect to an IRC server. Comic Chat talks to standard IRC networks. Mermaid Elizabeth keeps a handy list of servers and rooms that work great with Comic Chat.
4. Pick your character & emotion wheel. Choose an avatar, then drag the emotion wheel as you type to strike a pose.

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

5. Start typing! Hit enter and watch your words become the next panel of a comic strip you and your friends are drawing together. That's it! You're a comic now.

💾 For Tinkerers & Historians

This whole site lives in the open-source repository, which preserves source snapshots from a 1996 pre-release through the 2.5 beta, plus worked examples that get the vintage MFC code building on current Visual Studio.

💻 Browse the Source ⬇ Download a Build 🌐 Find a Server

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