PanelWave CMS Beta Opens to First 50 Creators

Frankfurt am Main, 8 October 2026. PanelWave, the Munich-based open ecosystem for interactive graphic novels, today opened its authoring platform, PanelWave CMS, to a first cohort of 50 creators. The invite-only beta begins on the opening day of the Frankfurter Buchmesse, where PanelWave presents the CMS, the open format and the open-source player at the XPLR: MEDIA in Bavaria booth (Hall 5.0, stand A71) from 7 to 11 October.

PanelWave CMS is a browser-based studio in which artists, writers and studios turn artwork into interactive, multilingual graphic novels without writing code. Panels are composed from layered images, video, text and sound; speech balloons are lettered with a comic balloon engine; hotspots and branching story graphs let readers make choices; and a localization workshop translates a work into further languages, with machine-translation assistance and exchange formats for professional translators. Works are published to the web from the same source that exports print-ready PDF, presentation and video formats.

Founding Creators programme

The first cohort joins through the Founding Creators programme. Participants receive twelve months of the Creator plan at no cost, personal onboarding, a Founding Creator designation in the public catalogue and a place in the first PanelWave Anthology, a curated collection of short interactive stories planned for release in early 2027. In return, each Founding Creator commits to publishing at least one interactive work by December 2026.

Applications are open to independent comic and webtoon creators, illustrators, and small studios. The programme is described at panelwave.org/founding-creators, where applications are accepted online; applications are also taken in person at the Buchmesse stand.

What the beta includes

The beta runs on the current PanelWave format version 1.7 and embeds the open-source PanelWave Player for preview, so what creators see while authoring is exactly what readers receive.

• A visual canvas editor with layers, magnetic alignment guides, undo history, and separate page layouts for mobile, tablet, desktop, A4 and US Letter print and 16:9 video formats.
• A comic balloon engine with ten balloon types and a style cascade from work defaults to characters to individual bubbles.
• A graph editor for branching narratives with conditions, a flow simulator and structural validation.
• Two AI-assisted importers: one turns a Fountain screenplay into a structured first draft, the other splits finished page images into editable panels for review.
• A localization workshop with string extraction, machine-translation assistance, translation memory, glossary and CSV/XLIFF exchange, plus text-to-speech voice generation per character.
• Reader analytics with a reading funnel, panel engagement and hotspot click heatmaps, and Stripe Connect payouts with no revenue share on content sales.
• Portable work archives so that a complete work can be exported and imported between systems.

At the Frankfurter Buchmesse

PanelWave is one of four Bavarian publishing projects selected by XPLR: MEDIA in Bavaria for its stand in Hall 5.0. Throughout the fair the player is demonstrated live: the same story branched, voiced and switchable between languages, on a phone and on a large screen. On Friday, 9 October at 13:00, founder Jens Hoppe presents "Das PanelWave JSON-Format für dynamische Graphic Novels der nächsten Generation" with a live demo and Q&A at the stand.

"Graphic novels have had two digital options for twenty years: a printed page shrunk onto a phone, or a video that takes the reader's hands off the wheel," said Jens Hoppe, founder of PanelWave. "The beta is the first time creators can build the third path themselves, and the Buchmesse is where the people who make and publish these stories are. Opening both on the same morning felt right."

Availability and pricing

The beta is invite-only and free of charge for participating creators for the duration of the programme. After the beta, PanelWave CMS is offered as a free tier with one full publication, a one-time Work Pass per additional book, and Creator and Studio subscriptions; publishers receive negotiated agreements. Details are at panelwave.org/pricing. PanelWave takes no revenue share on content sales at any tier.