PanelWave at the Frankfurter Buchmesse 2026: Live Demos at the XPLR: MEDIA Stand

The Frankfurter Buchmesse asks every year what the book of the future looks like. This October we get to bring an answer to the fair floor. XPLR: MEDIA in Bavaria, the Bavarian media innovation initiative, has selected PanelWave as one of four projects it presents at its stand in Hall 5.0, stand A71, from 7 to 11 October 2026. The full announcement is in the XPLR magazine: Bayerns Publishing-Zukunft auf der Frankfurter Buchmesse.

XPLR describes PanelWave as an open-core system for digital graphic novels and webcomics that replaces the static print layout with interactive, multimedia storytelling: animation, sound, reader choices, and multilingual content. That is a fair summary. Here is what it means in practice, and why we think the book fair is exactly the right place for it.

A third path for the digital comic

Digital comics today choose between two compromises. The scanned print page shrinks awkwardly on a phone, with the language baked into the artwork. The motion-comic video runs on someone else's timeline, so the reader loses pace and control. PanelWave is a third category: panels are nodes in a story graph, connected by conditions and transitions, with layered artwork, speech balloons, hotspots to explore, branching storylines, multilingual text and audio, gentle motion, and fair paywalls. Readers decide pace, path, language, and accessibility settings themselves.

The ecosystem is open core. An open JSON format under CC BY 4.0 is the shared standard, an MIT-licensed web player renders it anywhere, and an optional no-code CMS is where authoring and publishing happen. Creators keep their content, pay no revenue share, and are not tied to any platform.

What you will see at the stand

The best argument for PanelWave is holding it. Throughout the five days we run the player live at the stand: the same story branched, voiced, and switchable between languages, on a phone in your hand and on a big screen next to it, with Page View and Panel View a tap apart.

On the authoring side we show the CMS as it stands after a busy summer: the Fountain screenplay importer and the AI page-split importer that turns finished pages into editable panels, video panels, the comic balloon engine, the localization workshop with DeepL assist and XLIFF exchange, reading-funnel analytics with click heatmaps, and the work archive that moves a whole work between systems. All of it is live for our first creators today.

Who we want to meet

If that is you, book a slot before the fair through our contact page and we will keep a demo seat free. Walk-ins are welcome too; the stand is staffed the whole time.

• Publishers and studios, including manga and bande dessinée houses, who need localization, team workflows, reader analytics, and multi-format export from one source.
• Comic and webtoon creators who want direct monetization without lock-in. Our Founding Creators programme offers twelve months of the Creator plan for free, personal onboarding, and a place in the first PanelWave anthology.
• Education and licensing partners interested in branching learning scenarios and new transmedia routes for existing IP.

Good company at the XPLR stand

PanelWave shares the stand with three other Bavarian projects: mybreev, a digital corporate-learning publisher turning specialist content into scalable B2B modules; Extended Books from Munich's Sophie Verlag, which adds videos, worksheets, and quizzes to printed children's books; and TrekKI, an on-premise AI travel assistant built with Rother Wanderverlag and Müller Reiseverlag. XPLR also presents the nominees for the Bavarian Book Prize and the year's best independent books from Bavaria. The complete stand programme, including talks on multimedia children's books and future skills in publishing, is in the XPLR article.

See you in Frankfurt

Frankfurter Buchmesse, 7 to 11 October 2026, Hall 5.0, stand A71 (XPLR: MEDIA in Bavaria). Talk on Friday 9 October at 13:00. Everything else, all week long. Cannot make it? The newsletter gets the recap and the demo video the week after.