Story angle for journalists
The Open Standard Play
A Munich founder is publishing the format before the business around it, betting that interactive graphic novels need an EPUB moment more than they need another platform.
The story
Digital comics never got a shared container. Every platform invented its own, and every creator who signed up got locked in. PanelWave publishes a JSON format for interactive graphic novels under CC BY 4.0, ships an MIT-licensed player that renders it, and only then sells an authoring tool on top. The bet is that an open standard with a free reader creates the trust and adoption a proprietary platform cannot, and that a fair commercial layer can live on top of it, as it did for e-books.
Why now
Webtoons proved the audience, motion comics proved the appetite for sound and movement, and AI tooling has made a one-person company able to build all three layers. The format reached version 1.5 in August 2026 after five backward-compatible releases; the player hit 1.0 in September; the CMS opens its gated beta at the Frankfurter Buchmesse in October.
Key facts
- The format is a single JSON manifest validated by a public JSON Schema; chapters are graphs of panels, not page sequences.
- Licences: format CC BY 4.0, player and tooling MIT, CMS proprietary. Content licences are never touched by the format.
- Every 1.0 manifest still validates against 1.5; changes go through a public RFC process and semantic versioning.
- Tooling: a command-line validator, TypeScript types, an open-source reference player, and public documentation.
Background reading
Documentation is public and citable; blog posts carry the reasoning.