Comics have a rich visual vocabulary and people find them appealing. They are also an effective form of communication. We have built a system called Comic Chat, that represents on-line communications in the form of comics. Comic Chat automates numerous aspects of comics generation, including balloon construction and layout, the placement and orientation of comic characters, the default selection of character gestures and expressions, the placement of panel breaks, and the choice of zoom factor for the virtual camera. It uses techniques that we learned by working with a professional comic artist, to create comics depicting textual conversations. Comic Chat started out as a project at Microsoft Research, and now ships with the latest version of Windows '95, Internet Explorer 4, The Microsoft Network and will be included as part of Windows '98 and Windows NT 5. This talk will describe the technology behind Comic Chat and our experiences trying to bring it to market.