Comic Chat was distributed broadly. It was first released as part of the Internet Explorer 3 Full Download during the summer of 1996, and was subsequently included as part of Windows 98 and NT 5, and with IE 4 and 5. It also became the official chat client of The Microsoft Network (MSN). Comic Chat was localized into 24 different languages, and had millions of users throughout the world. As it gained in popularity, subsequent versions were renamed Microsoft Chat.

The primary motivations for this new representation were to create a graphical history of the conversation, and to automate positioning and default gesturing and expressions, allowing people to focus on the main task at hand - chatting. However, a lot of work went into capturing the aesthetics and rules of comics generation, and the result was a visually pleasing and natural presentation that, perhaps more than any other reason, led to its appeal.

Comic Chat is a radically different kind of internet chat program, released by Microsoft in 1996. Instead of representing chat dialogs as text, like the majority of internet chat programs, or as graphical worlds like some emerging chat programs, Comic Chat visually represents conversations as sequences of comic panels. The application is shown in Panel (a) to the left.

Initially Comic Chat exclusively featured the comic art of Jim Woodring , a highly regarded (and brilliant) independent comic artist. Initially we had Jim illustrate real text chat transcripts to determine if the approach was worthwhile, and we were excited by the results. Panel (b) shows an original text chat transcript drawn by Jim (click to see full size) . He gave Comic Chat its "look", and much of the challenge of creating Comic Chat was "reverse-engineering Jim" -- figuring out the rules he used in composing his comics, and then doing our meager best at replicating these rules in the program. Subsequently Microsoft released a character editor that allowed anyone to create their own visual representation or "avatar".

David (DJ) Kurlander proposed the idea for Comic Chat, started the project within Microsoft Research, and developed the initial code in 1995. He, together with Tim Skelly and David Salesin, wrote a SIGGRAPH paper on the technology. Microsoft Research's Virtual Worlds Group assisted DJ in productizing Comic Chat for its first release, and then DJ moved to the Internet Division where he managed the development of subsequent versions and other communications technology.

That said, Comic Chat communicates via the internet standard IRC (Internet Relay Chat) protocol, and hence it still works on many of the existing IRC servers on the net. To download Comic Chat, and get started using the application, simply follow the instructions here.

In 2001, MSN decided to turn off its comic chat servers. MSN was transitioning from a subscription-based service to an ad-sponsored web destination, and felt that it could get more $$$ from hosting a smaller chat canvas on a web page with plenty of screen real estate for ads. It was a boneheaded decision, and it destroyed much of the existing comic chat community.