Microsoft Comic Chat

~ the obituary ~

microsoft comic chat shipped with internet explorer 3 in august 1996, which means it was technically on every windows pc i used between 1998 and 2001. nobody i knew opened it. it was an irc client that drew your conversation as a comic strip. each user picked a cartoon avatar, and the program would automatically generate a panel for every line of text with the speaker's expression chosen from a wheel of basic emotions. that is a very specific product idea, and the audience for it was thin even by the standards of late-90s microsoft.

the technical lead was david kurlander at microsoft research's virtual worlds group. the cartoon characters and the original art style came from jim woodring, the underground comics artist. the wheel of emotions was the clever part. you typed a sentence and dragged a knob around a small radial widget to pick whether your avatar should look angry or happy or shy when delivering the line. the algorithm would then pose the panel and resize the speech balloon to fit.

under the hood comic chat was a regular irc client. it could connect to any irc server. but most of its character logic only worked when both ends were running comic chat, which made it a closed-loop product. if you joined a normal irc channel from comic chat, the regulars would see a flood of "user has joined wearing the bunny avatar" join messages and assume you were a bot. the result was that comic chat users mostly chatted with other comic chat users on a small set of microsoft-hosted irc servers.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

comic chat became the official chat client of msn for a brief window in the late 90s. it was localized into 24 languages, including turkish, which is more international reach than most microsoft research projects ever got. on the windows side it shipped bundled with internet explorer 3.0 through 5.0. version 2.5 in march 1999 was the last meaningful update. by then it was already being squeezed by aim and icq on the casual chat side and by mainstream irc clients like mirc on the technical side.

the comics produced by the program were saved as proper comic strips. you could export a chat session as a series of panels and post them on a web page. some users built whole webcomic projects out of comic chat exports. the format had a cult following on geocities through the late 90s, the kind of online subculture that left a thousand abandoned fan sites behind by 2003.

~ the funny part ~

the most-remembered thing about comic chat has nothing to do with chat. the install package came bundled with a font that vincent connare had drawn at microsoft for the speech balloons, since trebuchet and times new roman both looked wrong inside a cartoon panel. the font was called comic sans ms. it was meant to be used inside this one program. instead it got installed on every windows machine that received an ie 3 or ie 4 update, and from there it leaked into church bulletins and elementary school worksheets all over the world.

vincent connare has spent the rest of his career being asked about comic sans by journalists who have never heard of comic chat. the chat program died in 2001. the font that was supposed to live inside it became the most argued-about typeface of the early internet. comic chat is in some sense remembered only as a delivery vehicle for that font.

~ the long tail ~

microsoft shut down its irc servers around 2001 when msn exited the chat business. the comic chat binary still exists in the wild. the program will install on windows 11 and connect to a public irc server, but the avatars are bundled assets that come with the install, so without the rest of the comic chat ecosystem you end up rendering one-sided strips of yourself talking to text.

david kurlander posted the original research papers on his personal site, where they are still readable in 2026 if you want to see the auto-illustration algorithm explained at the level a 1996 sigchi paper assumes. the algorithm was clever enough that academic computer-graphics literature still cites it. the product never recovered from the shape it had: an irc client for an audience that did not exist.

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