July 16, 2026
Comic Sans Strikes Back
Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source
Microsoft just revived its weird comic-book chat app and the internet is feeling things
TLDR: Microsoft has open-sourced Comic Chat, its old app that turned online conversations into comic strips and helped introduce Comic Sans. In the comments, people are mostly nostalgic and amused, with some saying it still has real potential and others treating it like a lovable internet fossil worth reviving.
Microsoft has thrown open the vault and released Comic Chat as open source, which means one of the internet’s strangest early chat experiments is now free for everyone to poke through, revive, and possibly turn into something gloriously unhinged. This was the 1990s app that turned plain online chat into little comic strips with cartoon characters, speech bubbles, and moods — and yes, it also helped unleash Comic Sans on humanity. For some readers, that makes this a history lesson. For others, it’s basically the scene of the crime.
The comments are less a debate and more a nostalgic group hug with a side of chaos. One person immediately dropped the GitHub link, as if opening the floodgates for digital archaeologists. Another went straight for absurdist humor with a random BoneQuest link, which feels exactly on-brand for a story about a comic-style chat relic clawing its way back from the dead. The strongest mood? “This goofy old thing still has legs.” One commenter flat-out said the project still has potential, while another said they hope for “fun spinoffs,” instantly turning the whole thread into a fantasy league for cursed retro remakes.
And then came the memory lane flexes: fresh Windows 95 or 98 installs, Pentium II machines, first introductions to internet chat. That’s the real drama here — not outrage, but a pile-on of people realizing this oddball app was weirdly ahead of its time. The hottest take is that what looked like a joke in the 90s now feels like the ancestor of stickers, avatars, and expressive messaging. The internet is laughing, reminiscing, and quietly wondering whether Microsoft’s old comic toy was secretly onto something big.
Key Points
- •Microsoft has released the source code for Comic Chat, its 1990s IRC client, as open source.
- •Comic Chat rendered IRC conversations as comic panels with characters, speech bubbles, gestures, and facial expressions derived from text.
- •The article links Comic Chat to the early adoption of Comic Sans, which was designed by Vincent Connare in 1994.
- •David “DJ” Kurlander began developing Comic Chat in 1995 at Microsoft Research; it was built with Visual C++ 4.0 and MFC and released in 1996 with Internet Explorer 3.
- •The open-source release includes original source snapshots and AI-assisted modernization experiments for current Visual Studio tools, modern IRC servers, and high-resolution Windows systems.