tl;dr: Microsoft has open-sourced Comic Chat, the 1996 IRC client that rendered conversations as comic panels with illustrated characters and speech bubbles, and famously debuted the Comic Sans font. The release includes original source code (Visual C++ 4.0/MFC) along with AI-assisted modernization attempts that get it building with current Visual Studio tools and connecting to modern IRC servers. Created by DJ Kurlander's team at Microsoft Research with artwork by cartoonist Jim Woodring, the code is now available on GitHub for study and experimentation.